6 ms·

I could support the housing first policy if it were somewhere where the cost of living is dirt cheap. It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing peo

I could support the housing first policy if it were somewhere where the cost of living is dirt cheap. It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world.

Kalium 7y ago
There's a disconnect here. Individuals experiencing homelessness have already chosen to do so somewhere expensive. Generally they have reasons for this that they find compelling. How would you propose to convince them to relocate to this hypothetical cheap homelessness-warehousing center elsewhere?
- isoskeles 7y ago
  I don't think any convincing would be necessary if the help were simply cut off in high cost of living areas and only available in lower cost areas. This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).
  - istjohn 7y ago
    The hypocrisy! NIMBY is precisely the name for this entire thread of self-pitying heartless belly aching.
- munificent 7y ago
  I have compelling reasons to choose to live in a penthouse suite in Manhattan. It has a beautiful view. Gorgeous amenities. Private parking. Really, it's the best. However, I can't afford to, so the way society persuades me not to live there is that they kick me out, since I didn't pay for the place and don't have any claim to it. This does not seem entirely unreasonable to me. I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no". The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive. The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way. Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There may well be a limited supply of penthouse apartments in specific neighbourhoods. But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high. Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point. I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E": https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking-americas-eviction-crisis https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...
    - freyr 7y ago
      It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill. I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
      - toast0 7y ago
        I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive. I think this can be problematic for several reasons: It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify? If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 7y ago
dredmorbius 7y ago
Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant. How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost? Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required. Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs. Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs. Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.
dclowd9901 7y ago
What rubs me wrong about your argument is the capitalist nature of it. Access to resources and infrastructure shouldn't be limited to the extremely wealthy. A city should offer housing to everyone at every rung of the ladder because it takes a team to make it work.
- jlawson 7y ago
  This approach, known as Communism, has been tried many times. Turns out that although 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sounds nice, wealth actually doesn't come from a fixed pie we get to cut up via politics. We actually need to let people keep what they create, or they won't bother creating and everyone starves.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - klez 7y ago
    How you got from "offer public housing" to "abolish private property" is a mental path I'd like to explore. I really mean it. Because it seems that a lot of people seem to mix up welfare state with communism and I'm trying to understand why.
    - xpe 7y ago
      Many people seem to have setup a false choice between the two. Some people, especially politicians, benefit from the false dichotomy. I would hope that intellectually honest people can see there is large design space for the role of government. Choosing from these options — what is better and worse — depends on individual values and collective responsibilities.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All these battles have been fought a million times on the internet and nothing new ever comes of such discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world. I'm not a strong proponent of the Housing First model, but the reality is that it's generally cheaper to house people than to pick up the tab for medical care et al for homeless individuals. Medical bills for the homeless population tend to cost far more than just covering their rent. Two supporting articles found via a quick google: https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-housing-homeless-health-costs-rand-study.html https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-h... https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-invest-housing-homeless-reduce-er-visits https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-invest-...

Kalium 7y ago

There's a disconnect here. Individuals experiencing homelessness have already chosen to do so somewhere expensive. Generally they have reasons for this that they find compelling. How would you propose to convince them to relocate to this hypothetical cheap homelessness-warehousing center elsewhere?

isoskeles 7y ago
I don't think any convincing would be necessary if the help were simply cut off in high cost of living areas and only available in lower cost areas. This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).
- istjohn 7y ago
  The hypocrisy! NIMBY is precisely the name for this entire thread of self-pitying heartless belly aching.
munificent 7y ago
I have compelling reasons to choose to live in a penthouse suite in Manhattan. It has a beautiful view. Gorgeous amenities. Private parking. Really, it's the best. However, I can't afford to, so the way society persuades me not to live there is that they kick me out, since I didn't pay for the place and don't have any claim to it. This does not seem entirely unreasonable to me. I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no". The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive. The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way. Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There may well be a limited supply of penthouse apartments in specific neighbourhoods. But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high. Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point. I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E": https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking-americas-eviction-crisis https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...
  - freyr 7y ago
    It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill. I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
    - toast0 7y ago
      I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive. I think this can be problematic for several reasons: It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify? If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago

Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.

dodobirdlord 7y ago
Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.
- sitkack 7y ago
  I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant. How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost? Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required. Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs. Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs. Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.

dclowd9901 7y ago

What rubs me wrong about your argument is the capitalist nature of it. Access to resources and infrastructure shouldn't be limited to the extremely wealthy. A city should offer housing to everyone at every rung of the ladder because it takes a team to make it work.

jlawson 7y ago
This approach, known as Communism, has been tried many times. Turns out that although 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sounds nice, wealth actually doesn't come from a fixed pie we get to cut up via politics. We actually need to let people keep what they create, or they won't bother creating and everyone starves.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- klez 7y ago
  How you got from "offer public housing" to "abolish private property" is a mental path I'd like to explore. I really mean it. Because it seems that a lot of people seem to mix up welfare state with communism and I'm trying to understand why.
  - xpe 7y ago
    Many people seem to have setup a false choice between the two. Some people, especially politicians, benefit from the false dichotomy. I would hope that intellectually honest people can see there is large design space for the role of government. Choosing from these options — what is better and worse — depends on individual values and collective responsibilities.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All these battles have been fought a million times on the internet and nothing new ever comes of such discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world. I'm not a strong proponent of the Housing First model, but the reality is that it's generally cheaper to house people than to pick up the tab for medical care et al for homeless individuals. Medical bills for the homeless population tend to cost far more than just covering their rent. Two supporting articles found via a quick google: https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-housing-homeless-health-costs-rand-study.html https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-h... https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-invest-housing-homeless-reduce-er-visits https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-invest-...