4 ms·

I understand that most cities also have restrictions like minimum unit size and requirements for every unit to have it's own bathroom and kitchen. In the past p

I understand that most cities also have restrictions like minimum unit size and requirements for every unit to have it's own bathroom and kitchen. In the past people who just started out and poor people had the option to rent such rooms and that way afford to live in urban areas and avoid a crazy commute. To make that work now you have to find roommates and take over a unit that wasn't meant for this use case. It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have

war1025 6y ago
The silly thing in my opinion is that college dormitories are exactly that type of housing. No kitchens, shared bathrooms. Works perfectly fine for housing large numbers of young people. Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Dorms have RAs, security officers, cleaning staff, food courts, university police, and a wrap of social services that can nudge a person slipping back into line, or send them packing quickly. Landlords, rightly, shouldn't be able to send people packing with little to no notice. Without the security, social services, and cleaning staff I expect any project of the same scale as a large University to catastrophically fail due to public outcry regarding the inevitable decay of living conditions. The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems? I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
  - war1025 6y ago
    > The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. When did I ever mention housing for the mentally ill? What I'm saying is I think consenting, functional adults should have the option of living in a dorm-style setting if they so choose. For one, it's a great way to build community. For two, it should be a significantly cheaper way to live, which would probably appeal mainly to the poor, but would also appeal to the same set of people that already live with multiple roommates to reduce costs. Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      About 20% of the population is living with a mental illness. [1] Your casual use of "consenting functional adults" is overly simplistic. It is a fact that desperate people make desperate decisions. If you're only allowing such people then we should set an income floor so the poor cannot be preyed upon. Say, the true cost of living in the city? Anyone making less is not in a fair position to consent to such living conditions. >Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately. Hah. Maybe the ones you live in. Can't tell you how many apartments I've lived or been in that had mold, roaches, faulty wiring, dangerous appliances, and the like that went without repair despite repeated complaints over months and years. So while in theory it's not a bad idea. In practice, because of the same societal problems that make this a serious consideration, projects like this are doomed to fail without massive community support and budgets that would probably rival just giving each tenant a custom ordered bare minimum trailer in a park packed like sardines. 1. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.sh...
    - wool_gather 6y ago
      Worth noting I think that we also do this kind of housing for people transitioning from prison back to normal life -- "halfway houses".
    - 6y ago
- zjaffee 6y ago
  And we are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses now that some are reopening, these laws were first put in place for related reasons...
  - war1025 6y ago
    > And we are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses now that some are reopening Honestly, great. Let the young catch it to act as firebreaks for the more vulnerable. If you are going to college in person right now, you have already judged the risks and deemed them acceptable. The thing I think is ridiculous is the number of universities shutting down completely at the first whiff of an outbreak. What did they think would happen? Have the backbone to let it burn through.
- spyspy 6y ago
  WeLive apartments are basically dorms for adults. A coworker lived in one for a few months while they got their bearings in NYC. For a slightly inflated rent you a fully furnished apartment with a bunch of people in the same situation as you - instant new network of friends and connections to get you started in a new place.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Boarding houses used to be fairly common, I'm not sure if this kind of regulation or something else drove them out of common use. The idea of not having to deal with cooking or meals out every night has a fair amount of appeal by itself.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Zoning and technology both had a role to play in their demise. Zoning reduced their scope, technology made living outside the city while working more possible and reduced the need.
zjaffee 6y ago
Sometimes we need to relearn from the lessons of the 20th century and not go around and build tenements again. Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  That's a great point! Definitely a negative externality I didn't consider and with this in mind requiring a kitchen and bathroom makes sense. Not sure about minimum unit sizes.
- asdff 6y ago
  Consider what we tolerate in the current status quo to weigh whether a tenement is a bad thing, where 90k people live in the streets of LA without running water in a pandemic, ironically camping along surface lots that used to be low cost motels with rooms for rent all over downtown LA, razed in the 70s to make parking for office workers living in the suburbs. Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and sometimes several family units are packed into a single 1br apartment in LA or in other high COL places as we speak. I've seen bunks for rent that look like they came out of a prison on my local craigslist, asking for $500 a month. Cheap and communal housing would solve so many ills that currently exist for the working class simply because we refuse to build this sort of housing anymore. Housing that used to dominate cities like LA and gave opportunity to the working poor who couldn't afford a better situation. Housing that we sorely lack, and the lack of which push people into real tenement conditions today, or even on the street, while they work part or full time trying to make ends meet.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > where 90k people live in the streets of LA False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.

war1025 6y ago

The silly thing in my opinion is that college dormitories are exactly that type of housing. No kitchens, shared bathrooms. Works perfectly fine for housing large numbers of young people. Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
Dorms have RAs, security officers, cleaning staff, food courts, university police, and a wrap of social services that can nudge a person slipping back into line, or send them packing quickly. Landlords, rightly, shouldn't be able to send people packing with little to no notice. Without the security, social services, and cleaning staff I expect any project of the same scale as a large University to catastrophically fail due to public outcry regarding the inevitable decay of living conditions. The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems? I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.
- war1025 6y ago
  > The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. When did I ever mention housing for the mentally ill? What I'm saying is I think consenting, functional adults should have the option of living in a dorm-style setting if they so choose. For one, it's a great way to build community. For two, it should be a significantly cheaper way to live, which would probably appeal mainly to the poor, but would also appeal to the same set of people that already live with multiple roommates to reduce costs. Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    About 20% of the population is living with a mental illness. [1] Your casual use of "consenting functional adults" is overly simplistic. It is a fact that desperate people make desperate decisions. If you're only allowing such people then we should set an income floor so the poor cannot be preyed upon. Say, the true cost of living in the city? Anyone making less is not in a fair position to consent to such living conditions. >Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately. Hah. Maybe the ones you live in. Can't tell you how many apartments I've lived or been in that had mold, roaches, faulty wiring, dangerous appliances, and the like that went without repair despite repeated complaints over months and years. So while in theory it's not a bad idea. In practice, because of the same societal problems that make this a serious consideration, projects like this are doomed to fail without massive community support and budgets that would probably rival just giving each tenant a custom ordered bare minimum trailer in a park packed like sardines. 1. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.sh...
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    Worth noting I think that we also do this kind of housing for people transitioning from prison back to normal life -- "halfway houses".
  - 6y ago
zjaffee 6y ago
And we are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses now that some are reopening, these laws were first put in place for related reasons...
- war1025 6y ago
  > And we are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19 on college campuses now that some are reopening Honestly, great. Let the young catch it to act as firebreaks for the more vulnerable. If you are going to college in person right now, you have already judged the risks and deemed them acceptable. The thing I think is ridiculous is the number of universities shutting down completely at the first whiff of an outbreak. What did they think would happen? Have the backbone to let it burn through.
spyspy 6y ago
WeLive apartments are basically dorms for adults. A coworker lived in one for a few months while they got their bearings in NYC. For a slightly inflated rent you a fully furnished apartment with a bunch of people in the same situation as you - instant new network of friends and connections to get you started in a new place.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Boarding houses used to be fairly common, I'm not sure if this kind of regulation or something else drove them out of common use. The idea of not having to deal with cooking or meals out every night has a fair amount of appeal by itself.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Zoning and technology both had a role to play in their demise. Zoning reduced their scope, technology made living outside the city while working more possible and reduced the need.

zjaffee 6y ago

Sometimes we need to relearn from the lessons of the 20th century and not go around and build tenements again. Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.

ajmurmann 6y ago
That's a great point! Definitely a negative externality I didn't consider and with this in mind requiring a kitchen and bathroom makes sense. Not sure about minimum unit sizes.
asdff 6y ago
Consider what we tolerate in the current status quo to weigh whether a tenement is a bad thing, where 90k people live in the streets of LA without running water in a pandemic, ironically camping along surface lots that used to be low cost motels with rooms for rent all over downtown LA, razed in the 70s to make parking for office workers living in the suburbs. Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and sometimes several family units are packed into a single 1br apartment in LA or in other high COL places as we speak. I've seen bunks for rent that look like they came out of a prison on my local craigslist, asking for $500 a month. Cheap and communal housing would solve so many ills that currently exist for the working class simply because we refuse to build this sort of housing anymore. Housing that used to dominate cities like LA and gave opportunity to the working poor who couldn't afford a better situation. Housing that we sorely lack, and the lack of which push people into real tenement conditions today, or even on the street, while they work part or full time trying to make ends meet.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > where 90k people live in the streets of LA False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.