>“The Collective gave me that flexibility, but what kept me there – and I’ve extended my original contract – is the community and all the other things that come with it.”
> co-living is billed as a solution to the housing crisis – but others say it’s simply an attempt to cash in on it
I mean, why not both? I think the problem is real, and I think modern housing approaches are driven by patterns and drives that are woefully outdated. I think there must be more humane, more collaborative ways to live.
On the other hand, I can name a lot of companies that market to real problems but clearly care much more about massive revenue than making any real difference.
Because there really isn't a housing crisis so much as a market failure to provide architecturally suitable spaces.
Consider that cities in N. America either have homes with large lots or condos with maximum 2 bedrooms (the price for 3 bedrooms or more scale non-linearly). Therefore it is very difficult to have a family of 4+ in an apartment.
The homes with large lots create areas with too low density which cause our transportation woes (long commutes, highways, infeasibility of public transport).
The 2 bedroom condo building are also often high-rises, which are also terrible (density is too high, making transportation near the building very difficult - just see the jams caused by people getting out of the high rise in the morning).
A more sensible, IMHO, is to have apartment blocks no taller than 8 stories with a good mix of 1, 2, and three bedroom units. These are found in poorer developed countries where the middle class could not necessarily afford a car, never mind two (my family in BsAs, for example in a 100 m^2, three bedroom apt)
SF isn't the whole world. Yes, there is gov't insanity in housing in the US, but bad housing decisions are made across the US' various states and city governments.
Canada, with a much more sensible gov't [0], has similar woes driven by building idiotic high rises.
[0] Govt spending as a fraction of GDP is similar; the suburbs are much higher density than the US; the line at the DMV takes less then 15 minutes; a new passport takes 2 hours to get from when it was requested (clearly I've lived in very many places).
Yes, I have read that the reason Soviet housing blocks were generally 6-9 stories was that the planners found it to optimize density. The other main benefit of Soviet style housing was that there were large green areas between buildings, which we don’t have in a lot of American cities with similarly sized apartment buildings - here they will more commonly have a very small courtyard, bigger parking area, and otherwise go right up to the road.
Kinda. They weren't nearly as well thought out as the Soviet apt. were, and the underlying city planning was incompatible with the design.
After all, if you're transforming your cities into a sea of asphalt and destroying the public transportation systems, how convenient is a housing project with thousands of units and no parking?
They also made cities sprawl a lot more than they did in the past, and built good public transport links so you can easily travel to your job without a car (which only a couple of people in your building would have).
There was a lot of thought put into those housing blocks. Unfortunately, they invested the hard thought once and then copy/pasted it for the next 1 million units. Then they used bad materials.
On the other hand, the Germans gave them a proper housing crisis to solve :S
In my city it's essentially illegal to build higher density residences than exist currently. Not sure how this is a failure of the market. So of course rents and real estate values are soaring and the current landowners do everything in their power to prevent development of anything that would allow people to live in the city cheaply.
> recently, the Somerville planning office released a report in which they confided that, in a city of nearly 80,000 people, there are exactly 22 residential buildings that meet the city’s zoning code. Every single other home is too dense to be legal: Either it takes up too much of the lot, or it has too many homes, or it’s too tall, or it’s not set far back enough from the street, and so on. (Note that this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.)
I had the displeasure of touring the building from the article, and can say categorically that place is a modern day shithole, replete with random inner doors in the property padlocked shut from the "residents". It's basically an office block with as many _tiny_ rooms packed together as humanely possible, with shitty aircon and absolutely no sound insulation between whoever your existential pigeonhole happens to be paired with. The experience left me more concerned for the mental health of the people packed into those spaces than anything else
That's a great analogy. And what's interesting is that looking back, living in a college dorm was one of the happiest periods of my life. I'm sure many others would express the same sentiment.
I think the lesson is that having a sense of community and opportunities for regular socialization far outweigh the impact of things like square footage or granite countertops. In terms of subjective wellbeing, most of us would probably do better to live closer to friends and family, even if it means a step-down to a shittier house.
I do have to ask if you would have still been happy had your parents lived in the dorm room next to yours: I feel a lot of the feelings associated with living in a dorm come more from living with friends than living with your family ;)
A lot of people would express the sentiment that their late teens/early twenties (when they lived in college dorms) were one of the happiest periods of their life. OTOH, take the average 35-year-old and put them in the same dorm, and then see how happy they are there.
Living in a college dorm when I was young was definitely not one of the happiest periods of my life, and having roommates at 35 wasn't either. But at least when I had roommates, it was enabling me to live in a major metropolitan area (not SF) for ~$1K/month.
One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage, because for those completely out of their luck a 20 sq. ft. room with unfinished plywood walls and broken fire detectors is still a 1000% better than a torn-up tent in the park. Granted the place in this article is just a gentrified tenement for hipsters working in entry positions paying twice the national average but want to live in places for those making 3x the average, but that doesn't invalidate the need for ultra-barebones housing.
This reminds me of a mayor of a Canadian town that trialed giving homeless people houses. At first he was skeptical that they should have nice houses, then later realized it didn't matter.
Why should they have granite countertops when I don't?
>"However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense."
Clugston says that it costs about $20,000 a year to house someone. If they're on the street, it can cost up to $100,000 a year.
This one is pretty heart warming too:
>He says city staff found housing for one man, but he insisted on leaving to sleep under cars. Day after day, they'd search him out and take him back to his new home. "They did it 75 times, but they had the patience and they didn't give up on him and, eventually, he ended up staying in the house," he says. "Ultimately, people do want a roof over their heads."
I mean, do you know what winters can get like in Medicine Hat? Part of it was probably just realizing that they didn't have to suffer in the winter as they're accustomed...
I was really just making an example. The person wasn't necessarily being forced to stay under a roof by 'state goons', they may simply have needed to be shown 75 times to figure it out. There are many fields where that is normal albeit usually what we would consider more complex tasks and you'd generally expect someone to latch onto the knowledge faster. There are arts where the most basic moves will be practiced thousands of times to master them and still seek some further layer of understanding. When you consider the range of problems that contribute to homelessness I can imagine someone just needed to see it 75 times to learn it.
hard to say, the article just presents "man relocated 75 times, finally stays put" and the conclusion "ultimately everyone wants a roof over their head" back to back as if that conclusion obviously follows. the reader has no idea whether the guy genuinely preferred his new dwelling or if he just gave up resisting. or maybe the 75th time happened to line up with the first cold night and he decided to stay just for the winter.
I'm not trying to be flippant here; I think we walk a dangerous line when we presume to know what's best for a person and especially when we apply pressure to get them to change their ways.
one of my good friends from high school developed severe schizophrenia after graduating and has been homeless for several years now. he has a standing offer of support from his (wealthy) parents on the sole condition than he start some form of treatment. I and some of our other friends have repeatedly tried to help him get into housing, treatment, or even temporary shelter, and he always refuses. his parents had him involuntarily committed for a few days; he left as soon as he was able. when I run into him and ask how he's doing, he always says he's doing great and loves the freedom of his lifestyle. he doesn't look great, but is it really up to me to decide?
I don't understand why "why should they have granite countertops when I don't?" is a stupid thing to say. The article doesn't explain. Do you have more context, or is there anyone else here who can explain what's wrong with that statement?
> One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage
A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.
That seems a non-sequitur. In a free market, the price isn't driven by what the owner 'wants'. Throwing 'wealthy elite' in there seems like snobbery. That sentence doesn't mean anything.
A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.
That was just an example, meant to foster meaningful commentary. But let me give it a try:
Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on.
I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics.
On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates.
It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
It isn't even a conspiracy. Lots of people loudly and overtly oppose policies that might lower housing costs (or even just increase supply enough to reduce the rate of increase).
The word "conspiracy" is often used to avoid talking about general motives of individual actors that lead to some emergent behavior. It's basically a combination of an ad-hominem (claiming unreasonable paranoia) and straw man (the high bar of some secretive cabal meeting).
Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
Just blaming "regulation" without qualification is a little vague for my tastes. There are important reasons why we don't just allow anyone to come along and build anything anywhere. Some of those reasons are really good— neighbourhood character, height limits, flood/ecology/watershed management, traffic management, etc.
And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
Neighborhood character and height restrictions aren't "really good", they are maybe okay sometimes.
Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
As an aside, Georgia periodically tries to claim a chunk of Tennessee to get access to the Tennessee River.
"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)
If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
Without "regulation" downtown San Fransisco would be a towering mass of high rise apartment complexes. Traffic would be impossible so people would be forced to find alternatives. There would be endless bitching about the eyesores on the horizon and the perpetually congested streets and the ruination of property values for the heavily gentrified neighborhoods.
It would be better for some (more reasonable rents, no need to own a car) but worse for others (retirees who intended to sell their house for millions and move out to the country). It would also force the city to invest in more mass transit, which will inconvenience a lot of car owners.
The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.
No offense, but I could care less about some boomer who will only make 500% profit off of his house rather than 1000%, vs letting people who aren't developers live in the city they work in. Car users benefit from better transportation because their repair bills go down, and there are less cars on the road.
Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.
No offense, but it is hard to care about the problems a bunch of 20-somethings making multiples of the median household income have finding apartments for prices they want to pay. Particularly if they don't live in the area they want to diddle around with.
First of all, they probably wouldn't make as much, at least at entry level, if cost of living wasn't so high. Second, the silicon valley ecosystem isn't even mostly populated by developers, the rest of the people making below median household income need places to live too. The housing problem isn't a "rich millennial vs rich boomer" scenario, it's "rich boomer vs literally everyone else". Maybe if they had to pay property taxes on the current value of their property they'd move somewhere else, and we wouldn't have this issue.
Would the rents actually be better, or would people now in Oakland move into SF?
The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".
Increase the supply and the price eventually has to drop. Basic supply and demand. That said, this problem has been allowed to grow exceptionally big and there is an fantastic amount of pent-up demand that would have to be satisfied before prices really started to normalize.
That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.
To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.
Neighborhood character and height limits can mean a lot of things and be implemented for different reasons. If done in the NIMBY sense of "you can't have anything I don't like", yes it's horrendous.
But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.
I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.
Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.
Part of the reason Paris feels different is that they've mostly allowed the city to grow up, everywhere, instead of just a few places. The latter is more likely to lead to not very friendly feeling skyscrapers without a lot at the street, human level.
And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.
Ha, I knew putting that in there would be contentious, but I suppose that's my fault for doing so in a comment specifically calling out the vaguery of "regulations".
In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.
Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:
Regulation means you don’t get half-arsed made houses that have no fire alarms or come down in the middle of the night, have no running water or have dangerous electrical work and follow no building codes... the kind of housing we used to see in pre-WWII shanty-town housing.
That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
I think the OP is referring to zoning regulation and not housing regulation. Zoning in the Bay Area is truly horrendous. There's vast swaths of land that's mandatory detached single home only. Some cities in the Bay Area, for example, even ban a second storey.
I wasn't really being specific, I was simply addressing the statement that housing prices are a 'free' market, which they aren't.
There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.
What the owners want (in terms of $ for their house) impacts the supply of houses, which impacts the price of houses. It is further impacted by city councils restricting building new housing (city council is composed of home owners) who have an incentive to raise the value of their house to what they want.
Real estate prices are inextricably linked to the wealthy, even just the upper-middle and middle classes. With the stagnation of wages and the limiting of the workforce, one of the only remaining routes to long term prosperity and social mobility is property ownership.
This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die.
Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door.
I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k.
So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.
The jobs will follow when employers can’t hire anyone. If one wants to live in a urban dump to have a certain job, that’s fine, but don’t expect government intervention if they employer does not pay a living wage.
It’s not binary. Move somewhere with some jobs, maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. Then other (higher paying) jobs may follow, which will raise the pay for everyone.
In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.
Rather than just wish rich people would change, it's worth considering why they want home prices out of reach.
One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.
As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in.
You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong?
For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.
> One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.
That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live.
> For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me.
> Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it?
Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.
Careful of mixing up cause-and-effect. Plenty of hillbillies would love to live on the beautiful California west coast next to the beach, if they could afford it. Anyway, hillbillies was an obvious stand-in for all sorts of bad neighbors, whether that be the guy with the constantly barking dog, the drunk, the guy always playing his loud subwoofer, etc.
>as it doesn't involve me
When your neighbors are shouting at each other with you in the middle, it involves you.
>why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors?
You absolutely shouldn't, for we should all love our neighbors. But you should absolutely be allowed to hate your neighbors' actions.
>use the force of law to force them to change
Have you ever dealt with invoking city noise ordinances? It's a long, tiresome process, and meanwhile your neighbors you're invoking them against aren't going to be too happy with you. Take it from me, I grew up poor and lived in crappy neighborhoods. Playing outside as a 6-year-old, it was routine for the neighborhood drunk to yell slurs at me and my siblings. First day we moved in, Dad called the cops on that guy, and the cops basically chuckled at my Dad over the phone. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sir."
"I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me."
And if they get into arguments at the breakfast table?
I had a friend once who had a married couple as roommates. They didn't get along. The weekly RPG session was interrupted by arriving police a couple of times. Problem finally solved by my friend moving to a single-family dwelling.
It sounds awful, and really there should be better-supported and more dignified social options to get people off the streets. But in the absence of those, I think you do have a point here. If nothing else, access to a proper shower is an important stepping stone in seeking out and holding down a job.
I don't think the housing crisis is the primary driver, rather it's cheap loans and a booming market for urban residential development. They built co-living in Chicago! There is no housing crisis here, if anything they are saying we are overbuilt. https://chicago.goquarters.com/west-loop/
In decades past single room occupancy housing was far more common. However they were seen as a blight to the city since it was mostly occupied by drug addicts and the poor. So cities and neighborhoods didn't complain once real estate started to take off and they began to be converted into more lucrative forms of housing.
Eliminating the cheapest of the cheap eliminated the lesser of two evils.
That might be bad for your mental health but I know several people who enjoy that, and prefer the privacy of having a tiny personal space rather than a larger shared house. It’s important to get the right people into these.
I toured starcity in SF and indeed the rooms are tiny and the common space as well. If they had provided bigger rooms, and more common spaces and places to isolate yourself and a canteen, then I would have moved in.
Holy smokes, had to take a look. In theory an interesting idea but HOLY smokes, just saw the one in the mission, 3 floors, 21 rooms for people to live in, and just the first floor is common space and seems pretty inadequate...maybe it works for some but wow, starting at $2100k for this... Maybe I am in the minority but I don't find SF to be that compelling to live in the city. In NYC I get it, I don't need much space, there are tons of places for me to hang out in the evening which leaves space less necessary. But in SF I never had that feeling.
This has the potential to decrease or to slow the increase of commutes. How much are you concerned for the mental health of the people who do 4h+ round trip commutes? Both are terrible choices, I myself think I would prefer living in such a shithole when single, commuting forever when in a family where at least the kids can be spared it. I believe in giving people the choice. If you think it's not a real choice because all their alternatives are worse, well, they'll obviously fall back on these worst alternatives if this arrangement is made illegal.
>Decent joinery and inbuilt storage spares residents having to buy flat pack furniture, while the living spaces, which all flow into an outdoor area, are designed to encourage communal dining and social interaction
All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet. They also follow a consistent pattern of cramming as many people into a tiny space as possible to milk properties while billing themselves as driving some kind of positive housing revolution.
This is just open concept for housing and the CEO who talks about doing this out of some implied generosity is a comical stereotype of the sociopathic but charismatic SV executive.
If you want to build a community, you need to foster a common, meaningful goal for people to come together over, and it needs to be organic. It also helps if the people have a common culture/heritage. You can't commercialize community as a product to transient weekly renters from random places for any meaningful amount of time, it just comes off as forced and artificial, like corporate propaganda.
I agree with you about the CEO and business model.
That said, I mean: >All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet.
That's kind of a strange complaint, because why would such a person seek out a co-living arrangement? Wouldn't renting a studio or efficiency apartment be more consistent with his/her personality and desires as far as living arrangement? (And cheaper than a trendy co-living place to boot?)
>Wouldn't renting a studio or efficiency apartment be more consistent with his/her personality and desires
Sure, but in the article these spaces are billed by their marketing as solutions to the affordable housing crisis, but it seems like they're potentially missing out on a market share and possibly creating living spaces which are even uncomfortably open for extroverts, by being designed as excessively open, in the same way that open concept over optimizes for design constraint enabling collaboration to the overall detriment of comfort and productiveness.
Huh? People have been "co-living" in urban areas forever, even though in some areas it is technically illegal. It's technically illegal in the city I live in but everyone does it.
This just sounds like a corporate, rent extracting appropriation of "co-living".
Honestly I'm sick and tired of the normalization of rent seeking. It's draining our collective creative energy.
If you want a glimpse into the original organized "co-living" movement, see here: https://coophousing.org/
I'm a big fan of the co-living movement, and that's why it's exciting to see it mainstreamed by corporations. I hope they're successful and we see more options for people to live with one another. I live in a group house and don't mind seeing this lifestyle normalized. I certainly lose nothing when more options are available to others.
I hear you, and I'm all for alternative options for living. But I'm frustrated that for profit corporations have such a stranglehold on capital, and are therefore in a position to dictate the physical and social infrastructure of these spaces.
The corporate domination of capital is essentially takeover of local governance.
I think the solution is a land value tax. This would take the value out of excluding others from land. There are known solutions to this known problem, it's the political class to blame.
The central point of Roko's basilisk is that the "basilisk" is only dangerous to people who understand/agree with it, and thus, for LessWrong advocates, are vulnerable to acausal extortion from a malevolent future AI. To be a "victim" of the basilisk you must subscribe to various axioms, and if you wind up being correct, acting in accordance with your hypothetical singularity AI's hypothetical desires is paramount. For example, you must assume that the AI will come into being, can simulate copies of people derived from "first principles", and that "timeless decision theory" makes sense to both human beings and the AI to the extent that acausal motivation is viable. Some people are very convinced of these ideas, but there is hardly overwhelming consensus.
Runaway optimization of rent-seeking is more like a ponzi scheme "as advertised": the later you get in on the action, the harder you get screwed. It is uniformly bad for anyone who didn't have a combination of luck and capital in the early stages. The risk and payoff of not being able to afford housing in the forseeable future is much more concrete, universally applicable, and requires only extrapolating from trends; a far smaller series of logical leaps.
I'm not seeing the connection you're attempting to draw. Care to clarify?
The solution to the "housing crisis" is to establish a sensible legal framework that allows dense housing to:
- be owned by the individuals that live there if they choose to do so (renting should be a choice; owning should have similar accessibility)
- have a sensible framework for both renting and ownership that empowers the individuals actually living there e.g. no onerous lease crap or leasehold shenanigans
- actually be built e.g. kill off silly zoning
This sounds like none of those.
In most countries established interests block it. Hacking around it by just deciding that the way previous generations lived a happy life is inaccessible now and everyone should just live in Uber Flats is not the answer, sorry.
If as a renter you are free to do what you want in an apartment (on par with ownership, so if you end up damaging another apartment or the common areas you are responsible), and can't be kicked out because the landlord decides they want more money, I'm not sure if you would ever want to own a property. Excluding "investment opportunities" of course.
I have never seen a rental property where this was the standard. What you've actually just described is one of the best reasons to buy: As long as you pay your mortgage and property taxes and don't have an HOA, basically nobody is going to bother you.
That's how most social housing in the UK worked until a decade or two ago.
The home I grew up in was rented by my parents for over 20 years, they basically treated it as if they owned it.
We bought it recently because this may change at some point in the future. Practically other than the rent not existing nothing changes.
The model of a home as being this ephemeral thing that you just sort of occupy for a bit and then move on to the next town isn't one that most people actually want.
It's prevalent on Hacker News because there are a ton of people here with no family, no plans to form a family, and for whom moving around often for work is normal. Which is fine, but it's not representative of the general population.
For the people stuck owning it, yes. Why would I want to rent out a property under those terms? I'm assuming most of the risk for the asset, but giving up almost all control of it.
Rules follow norms. Rules will not change to accommodate new behavior until that behavior is already accepted. With authoritarian enforcement you can never get to this stage.
I might consider living in an apartment building that traded some private space for shared common space, but the architecture of such would need to be actually usable, not the same "amenities" which are ever present in luxury apartments and mostly unused, impersonal affairs. I think the key there would be replacing the hallway of doors with shared kitchen and lounge spaces or something along those lines.
I'm not interested in living in a cubbyhole inside a co-working space.
Almost all of these places look super depressing, like something out of American Psycho.
I'd expect the common room to look like a makerspace, or Grandma's house, or an artist's studio, or a game room, or maybe each corner of it is different, whatever.
I’m sick of the political opinion pieces disguised as news that amount to nothing more than “capitalism bad corporations evil” now dominating HN. Mostly NYT and Gaurdian articles.
We can’t just have an article about co-living... Ugh.
Here's how to do it on the cheap in Boston metro: Go to Craigslist, go to apartments for rent by owner, and look for a room that matches your balance of affordability, location, size, and amenities. Meet with the landlord to see it beforehand, be sure to discuss things like leaks, mold, and pests, and if you think you have a winner, move in. You will probably be sharing an apartment with three or four or five other people, but hey, that's Massachusetts. (The Ylvis song "Massachusetts" even makes reference to this.) You won't have to pay a finder's fee to some agency, you will be dealing directly with your landlord, and you won't find yourself in a situation that looks like it'll rapidly degenerate into a Focus Features dystopian art film. (Seriously? "The Collective"? You want to convince people you're not shit-tier offbrand Orwell with a name like that?)
You'll be all up on the lives of at least three other people -- some of whom figure as long as we live together, why not go out for pizza every now and then. At this point, whether you're sharing a by-owner apartment or shacking up with The Collective, your loneliness is largely a function of how aggressively you choose to sequester yourself from the people in your immediate environment. That is, until The Collective starts requiring neural implants as a condition of residency...
I can say that in my college dorm, one of the essential things was that the people near me were not random. They were my same age in the same college and in the 700 people who lived there a lot shared my interests. That’s what these facilities are trying to recreate, not just having a Homo sapiens within ten feet.
Has anyone here ever lived in a military mess? We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years and it can be a fantastic living experience, with communal meals and property, and opportunities to socialise, but your own space when you need it. I don't know why young professional civilians don't replicate it more often.
Years ago they called these things tenement buildings. Although the word can mean any multi-home building, it usually is used (at least in the USA) as a reference to high capacity, low footprint, urban living arrangements.
So, yeah. It's a nice way to solve housing crisis for relatively low income living, but don't act like it's some sort of innovation that people are going to find super desirable. Because most people won't. Some people do, but most people kinda want their own house.
I've been thinking about extreme co-living, with people who have a shared set of values living together and sharing not just the living space, but also wealth, to such an extent that it's basically a new-age monasticism. Regardless, the idea is crazy and out there, and probably possible with a limited subset of college professors or something like that, but still, it has its basis in shared values.
Working at the same company is not a shared set of values, at least not the way that companies are structured today and how workers are seen by those companies. As such, I don't think that these living spaces can build the tribal and communal opportunities that make a shared living space workable, and make people willing to improve that shared space. As corporations become larger, and with consideration to the fact that they might start to consider these kinds of shared values and try to build based on those, it might be possible, but it's probably also illegal for a corporation to do such a thing.
I think you nailed it with the common interests thing. People have compared this to both college dorm living and military boarding -- but in both of those cases you're surrounded by people your age with a ton of common interests, experiences, and values.
Creating a community from a mixed bag of corporate workers is possible, but it would take a lot more work.
Idea: create clean public restrooms and showers for everyone. Place them every few blocks so they are conveniently accessible everywhere. Have well paid cleaning staff that keeps the places in good shape at all times. Have well paid security staff, train them to be empathetic and help users out, also connect them with other organizations that could provide additional help that some users might need. And have free lockers where people can keep their clothes.
That might at least allow homeless people to be/feel clean, be treated with more respect/dignity and have a connection to a network of resources that could help them out.
In SF it might also get rid of the shit on the sidewalks, the smell of pee everywhere (especially around bars/nightclubs) and allow for easier tourism (it's kind of a pain finding a restroom some times when traveling).
Why not invest in the poor/less fortunate and give them as much as we can give them? All of society would be better off if instead of blaming these people for their situation, we helped them have a better one.
PS: Amsterdam has a slightly similar concept with their public urinals. They are kind gross, but they definitely help with keeping people from peeing all over the place. And pretty much everywhere in Japan there are clean public toilets (no showers or lockers though), it's really amazing.
> Why not invest in the poor/less fortunate and give them as much as we can give them?
It's hard to tell "less fortunate but a kind person that will be independent if given the chance" from "doesn't give a fuck and will take advantage of anything free/helpful in a destructive manner without any respect to others including those equally less fortunate or generous to him/her"
Society definitely creates the second type of people but I can't fault anyone for not wanting to put themselves in a position of vulnerability for the greater good of someone who won't appreciate it.
Cleaning staff and/or security staff are really expensive. In many other countries clean public restrooms are possible because users pay to use them, but in the US charging for restroom access is illegal in many places: https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/11/pay-toilets-shou...
The only thing I miss from living in a dorm is not having to cook, do dishes, or buy groceries. I know i could just go out to eat every meal but it seems more expensive when mom and dad aren't paying for it (or I'm not paying for it with loans that I'm still paying off...)
Co-living is total nightmare and the absolute end of human dignity since it reminds me having flatmates (I have plenty of experience with that) but in a way worse style
This is a glorified share house which is okay for short term ness when you know it’s end date. Being stuck there indefinitely totally sucks. People want their privacy and they want more of it as they get older. There’s a reason the richer you are the more you try to distance yourself from others by more privacy mechanisms.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadBit of a creepy sounding sentence with that name
I mean, why not both? I think the problem is real, and I think modern housing approaches are driven by patterns and drives that are woefully outdated. I think there must be more humane, more collaborative ways to live.
On the other hand, I can name a lot of companies that market to real problems but clearly care much more about massive revenue than making any real difference.
Consider that cities in N. America either have homes with large lots or condos with maximum 2 bedrooms (the price for 3 bedrooms or more scale non-linearly). Therefore it is very difficult to have a family of 4+ in an apartment.
The homes with large lots create areas with too low density which cause our transportation woes (long commutes, highways, infeasibility of public transport).
The 2 bedroom condo building are also often high-rises, which are also terrible (density is too high, making transportation near the building very difficult - just see the jams caused by people getting out of the high rise in the morning).
A more sensible, IMHO, is to have apartment blocks no taller than 8 stories with a good mix of 1, 2, and three bedroom units. These are found in poorer developed countries where the middle class could not necessarily afford a car, never mind two (my family in BsAs, for example in a 100 m^2, three bedroom apt)
Canada, with a much more sensible gov't [0], has similar woes driven by building idiotic high rises.
[0] Govt spending as a fraction of GDP is similar; the suburbs are much higher density than the US; the line at the DMV takes less then 15 minutes; a new passport takes 2 hours to get from when it was requested (clearly I've lived in very many places).
After all, if you're transforming your cities into a sea of asphalt and destroying the public transportation systems, how convenient is a housing project with thousands of units and no parking?
On the other hand, the Germans gave them a proper housing crisis to solve :S
> recently, the Somerville planning office released a report in which they confided that, in a city of nearly 80,000 people, there are exactly 22 residential buildings that meet the city’s zoning code. Every single other home is too dense to be legal: Either it takes up too much of the lot, or it has too many homes, or it’s too tall, or it’s not set far back enough from the street, and so on. (Note that this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.)
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
Really, this is what a lot of these co-living places are, they just don't want to use that four letter word: "Dorm".
I am amused, but not surprised to see us rediscover all the 'greatest' ideas of the USSR.
I'm assuming that the next one will be 'papers, please, comrade'...
I think the lesson is that having a sense of community and opportunities for regular socialization far outweigh the impact of things like square footage or granite countertops. In terms of subjective wellbeing, most of us would probably do better to live closer to friends and family, even if it means a step-down to a shittier house.
>"However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense."
Clugston says that it costs about $20,000 a year to house someone. If they're on the street, it can cost up to $100,000 a year.
This one is pretty heart warming too:
>He says city staff found housing for one man, but he insisted on leaving to sleep under cars. Day after day, they'd search him out and take him back to his new home. "They did it 75 times, but they had the patience and they didn't give up on him and, eventually, he ended up staying in the house," he says. "Ultimately, people do want a roof over their heads."
seems like a slightly unwarranted conclusion.
alternative conclusion: "Ultimately, people will submit to living under a roof if they are relocated by state goons seventy five times."
I'm not trying to be flippant here; I think we walk a dangerous line when we presume to know what's best for a person and especially when we apply pressure to get them to change their ways.
one of my good friends from high school developed severe schizophrenia after graduating and has been homeless for several years now. he has a standing offer of support from his (wealthy) parents on the sole condition than he start some form of treatment. I and some of our other friends have repeatedly tried to help him get into housing, treatment, or even temporary shelter, and he always refuses. his parents had him involuntarily committed for a few days; he left as soon as he was able. when I run into him and ask how he's doing, he always says he's doing great and loves the freedom of his lifestyle. he doesn't look great, but is it really up to me to decide?
A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.
A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.
Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on.
I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates.
It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions?
In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either.
"On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates."
Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects.
And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?
And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)
If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.
Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.
The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law
That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.
To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.
Absolutely not. These are horrendous reasons and take much of the blame for the housing crisis. We must build upwards to house people.
But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.
I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.
Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.
And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.
In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.
Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4550536,-80.4917221,331a,35y...
That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vanc...
That is not at all a natural spike in housing prices and it's pretty much made housing unaffordable here.
This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die.
Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door.
I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k.
So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.
That's almost never a good economic decision.
In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.
<Chortling with unholy glee>
One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.
As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in.
You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong?
For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.
That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live.
> For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me.
> Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it?
Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.
>as it doesn't involve me
When your neighbors are shouting at each other with you in the middle, it involves you.
>why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors?
You absolutely shouldn't, for we should all love our neighbors. But you should absolutely be allowed to hate your neighbors' actions.
>use the force of law to force them to change
Have you ever dealt with invoking city noise ordinances? It's a long, tiresome process, and meanwhile your neighbors you're invoking them against aren't going to be too happy with you. Take it from me, I grew up poor and lived in crappy neighborhoods. Playing outside as a 6-year-old, it was routine for the neighborhood drunk to yell slurs at me and my siblings. First day we moved in, Dad called the cops on that guy, and the cops basically chuckled at my Dad over the phone. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sir."
And if they get into arguments at the breakfast table?
I had a friend once who had a married couple as roommates. They didn't get along. The weekly RPG session was interrupted by arriving police a couple of times. Problem finally solved by my friend moving to a single-family dwelling.
That does not follow. You may be right, but not for that reason.
I don't think the housing crisis is the primary driver, rather it's cheap loans and a booming market for urban residential development. They built co-living in Chicago! There is no housing crisis here, if anything they are saying we are overbuilt. https://chicago.goquarters.com/west-loop/
In decades past single room occupancy housing was far more common. However they were seen as a blight to the city since it was mostly occupied by drug addicts and the poor. So cities and neighborhoods didn't complain once real estate started to take off and they began to be converted into more lucrative forms of housing.
Eliminating the cheapest of the cheap eliminated the lesser of two evils.
All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet. They also follow a consistent pattern of cramming as many people into a tiny space as possible to milk properties while billing themselves as driving some kind of positive housing revolution.
This is just open concept for housing and the CEO who talks about doing this out of some implied generosity is a comical stereotype of the sociopathic but charismatic SV executive.
If you want to build a community, you need to foster a common, meaningful goal for people to come together over, and it needs to be organic. It also helps if the people have a common culture/heritage. You can't commercialize community as a product to transient weekly renters from random places for any meaningful amount of time, it just comes off as forced and artificial, like corporate propaganda.
That said, I mean: >All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet.
That's kind of a strange complaint, because why would such a person seek out a co-living arrangement? Wouldn't renting a studio or efficiency apartment be more consistent with his/her personality and desires as far as living arrangement? (And cheaper than a trendy co-living place to boot?)
Sure, but in the article these spaces are billed by their marketing as solutions to the affordable housing crisis, but it seems like they're potentially missing out on a market share and possibly creating living spaces which are even uncomfortably open for extroverts, by being designed as excessively open, in the same way that open concept over optimizes for design constraint enabling collaboration to the overall detriment of comfort and productiveness.
This just sounds like a corporate, rent extracting appropriation of "co-living".
Honestly I'm sick and tired of the normalization of rent seeking. It's draining our collective creative energy.
If you want a glimpse into the original organized "co-living" movement, see here: https://coophousing.org/
The corporate domination of capital is essentially takeover of local governance.
I feel like this is the prototype of Roko's basilisk.[0]
I mean the rent-seeking part isn't new. That's been around since the beginning of time. Rent-seekers are going to rent-seek.
But the application of the latest modern technology to optimize it. This whole gig economy. That's new and feels like it's getting out of control.
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
Runaway optimization of rent-seeking is more like a ponzi scheme "as advertised": the later you get in on the action, the harder you get screwed. It is uniformly bad for anyone who didn't have a combination of luck and capital in the early stages. The risk and payoff of not being able to afford housing in the forseeable future is much more concrete, universally applicable, and requires only extrapolating from trends; a far smaller series of logical leaps.
I'm not seeing the connection you're attempting to draw. Care to clarify?
- be owned by the individuals that live there if they choose to do so (renting should be a choice; owning should have similar accessibility)
- have a sensible framework for both renting and ownership that empowers the individuals actually living there e.g. no onerous lease crap or leasehold shenanigans
- actually be built e.g. kill off silly zoning
This sounds like none of those.
In most countries established interests block it. Hacking around it by just deciding that the way previous generations lived a happy life is inaccessible now and everyone should just live in Uber Flats is not the answer, sorry.
That's how most social housing in the UK worked until a decade or two ago.
The home I grew up in was rented by my parents for over 20 years, they basically treated it as if they owned it.
We bought it recently because this may change at some point in the future. Practically other than the rent not existing nothing changes.
The model of a home as being this ephemeral thing that you just sort of occupy for a bit and then move on to the next town isn't one that most people actually want.
It's prevalent on Hacker News because there are a ton of people here with no family, no plans to form a family, and for whom moving around often for work is normal. Which is fine, but it's not representative of the general population.
For the people stuck owning it, yes. Why would I want to rent out a property under those terms? I'm assuming most of the risk for the asset, but giving up almost all control of it.
Nice. A totalitarian 'utopia', where your every move is watched on cctv for possible infractions.
I wonder what else they will punish residents for. Bringing dates back home? Having a skirt that's too short?
If those are against the community rules, absolutely, they should be punished.
Don't like the rules? Vote to change them or move somewhere else. You can't do this in China anyway, do treasure the opportunity.
I'm not interested in living in a cubbyhole inside a co-working space.
Almost all of these places look super depressing, like something out of American Psycho.
I'd expect the common room to look like a makerspace, or Grandma's house, or an artist's studio, or a game room, or maybe each corner of it is different, whatever.
We can’t just have an article about co-living... Ugh.
Since it's such 1984-speak.
Years ago they called these things tenement buildings. Although the word can mean any multi-home building, it usually is used (at least in the USA) as a reference to high capacity, low footprint, urban living arrangements.
So, yeah. It's a nice way to solve housing crisis for relatively low income living, but don't act like it's some sort of innovation that people are going to find super desirable. Because most people won't. Some people do, but most people kinda want their own house.
Tenement buildings -> Co-living
Serfdom -> Gig economy
Mass propaganda -> Targeted content
Working at the same company is not a shared set of values, at least not the way that companies are structured today and how workers are seen by those companies. As such, I don't think that these living spaces can build the tribal and communal opportunities that make a shared living space workable, and make people willing to improve that shared space. As corporations become larger, and with consideration to the fact that they might start to consider these kinds of shared values and try to build based on those, it might be possible, but it's probably also illegal for a corporation to do such a thing.
Creating a community from a mixed bag of corporate workers is possible, but it would take a lot more work.
That might at least allow homeless people to be/feel clean, be treated with more respect/dignity and have a connection to a network of resources that could help them out.
In SF it might also get rid of the shit on the sidewalks, the smell of pee everywhere (especially around bars/nightclubs) and allow for easier tourism (it's kind of a pain finding a restroom some times when traveling).
Why not invest in the poor/less fortunate and give them as much as we can give them? All of society would be better off if instead of blaming these people for their situation, we helped them have a better one.
PS: Amsterdam has a slightly similar concept with their public urinals. They are kind gross, but they definitely help with keeping people from peeing all over the place. And pretty much everywhere in Japan there are clean public toilets (no showers or lockers though), it's really amazing.
It's hard to tell "less fortunate but a kind person that will be independent if given the chance" from "doesn't give a fuck and will take advantage of anything free/helpful in a destructive manner without any respect to others including those equally less fortunate or generous to him/her"
Society definitely creates the second type of people but I can't fault anyone for not wanting to put themselves in a position of vulnerability for the greater good of someone who won't appreciate it.
At the same time, why "punish" everyone for the actions of a few?
Also, if everyone has access to a certain benefit, it's really hard to take advantage of it in a negative way. For example you can't resell it.
I feel like toilets/showers should be something like roads, ubiquitous, accessible to everyone and continuously maintained.
I haven't seen people complaining about trucks/busses using the roads too much/more than them, while making money.