8 ms·
That actually seems like a really good idea — I’d love to see more housing in the “downtown core” areas of SF, which are like 95% office space.
by FreakyT 6y ago
That actually seems like a really good idea — I’d love to see more housing in the “downtown core” areas of SF, which are like 95% office space.
- throwaway9980 6y agoEspecially good if the converted office space also provides a good work from home environment. Everyone is working from home and those that can are scrambling to expand their houses to suit a new lifestyle.
- bergstromm466 6y ago> Especially good if the converted office space also provides a good work from home environment. Or... you know... just give homeless people housing?
- adrianN 6y agoIs there data supporting the conclusion that lack of housing is what causes homelessness? I always thought that it was more of a failure of the social safety net.
- throwaway3699 6y agoLack of jobs and crushing taxes more like. Social safety nets aren't all they're cracked up to be, and leaves people trapped in that system forever.
- adrianN 6y agoBeing trapped in a social safety net is more desirable than being trapped under a bridge.
- StavrosK 6y agoReally? Living in a country with a safety net, it looks pretty damn positive to me, you get unemployment checks while you're unemployed which makes it much easier to take your time to find a good next job.
- ericmay 6y agoThe United States has unemployment benefits [1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_the_U...
- StavrosK 6y agoYes, but I have a feeling that's what the GP refers to when they say "trapped forever". I don't feel like our system traps you at all, so I was wondering why the GP feels that people get trapped.
- ericmay 6y agoSorry, I misunderstood the context. I thought you were from outside the United States as the origination of your comment.My fault!
- StavrosK 6y agoNo sorry, I confused you even more. I am from outside the US, I think my country's system doesn't trap you, so I was wondering why the US one does.
- ericmay 6y agoHaha no worries! I have not been on unemployment, so I'm afraid I can't comment on that. As someone else mentioned it does vary a bit state by state, so there could be something there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agotaxes do not cause homelessness. Ever.
- iso1210 6y agoThere seems to be milage in the idea that if you give someone a home you reduce homelessness https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-to-fix-homelessness-give-the-homeless-a-home-20150730-ginpeo.html https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-to-fix-homelessness-give-...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI don't know about that, however there is data that shows that providing homes to the homeless is a net win for society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- meerita 6y agoI want a free house too.
- jonsno56 6y agoJust call your daddy
- meerita 6y agoDaddy State? Daddy state! please, give me free housing! I don't care if you take it from others...
- bergstromm466 6y ago> I want a free house too. Well yes, for many of the young working class - rent is eating up over 2/3rd of their paychecks. We are being scammed by the Bourgeoisie with inherited wealth. This explains our situation well imo: - "So where did our land system come from? Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’ And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’. So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King. In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent. If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax. So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery. “Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.” Fast forward a few hundred years, to post-civil-war America and that’s exactly what played out. The plantation owners could no longer own slaves, so what they said is ‘Ok, I’ll pay you, say, $2 dollars a day’ — but by the way, I own the land, and the rent is… $2 a day.’’. Which, incidentally, led to the invention of a clever invention called a ‘chattel house’ which was a kind of kit house that gave families of plantation workers the ability to relocate to try to escape exploitative landlords." Fast forward again to today, and land is still the fundamental mechanism of racial inequity. To be blunt, all across the UK and the US, there are tenants with black and brown skin paying rent to landlords and mortgage lenders with white skin. Or commuting for hours. Or both. I imagine all of you have seen the speech made a couple of weeks ago by a young American writer called Kimberly Jones — if you haven’t, do — it’s absolutely the most eloquent piece of public speaking I’ve seen in a long time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4). In it she uses this incredible image of getting white people to imagine what it feels like to play “four hundred rounds of Monopoly” with the game rigged against you, enforced by violence. There’s an interesting backstory here, that you may know, which is that the game of monopoly was first invented by a woman called Elizabeth Magie — and originally called ‘The Landlords Game’ and it was created so that… basically one day someone could make exactly the speech that Kimberly Jones just did. So, broadly speaking — and I’m simplifying here — there were two positions in this power diagram. Tenant and landlord. And over time that piece of paper became a tradable asset, as well as an inheritable one: so you can literally buy the right to extract taxes from people. And it’s amazing to me that we don’t find that more weird than we do — it’s right there hidden in plain sight in the language we use: landlord. But such an extreme overclass/underclass diagram is politically hard to sustain. So, over time we saw the slow emergence of a middle position, which is for those who could get together just enough money to buy their own freedom from rent. Again, that’s why we have the word ‘Freehold’; it’s not free as in ‘no cost’ it’s free as in, ‘liberty’." Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3ba1f1b3 https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3... + "There are many kinds of monopoly, from utilities to pharmaceutical patents, but the greatest – the ‘mother of all monopolies’ as Churchill described it – is land. Land rents are a weird leftover of the medieval feudal system: a privatised location tax that is suffocating every Westernised economy today." "It is worth remembering that there is no political argument —Left, Liberal or Right — that even attempts to justify economic rent-seeking on the basis of principle. You will not find one in any book. Adam Smith was against it, Karl Marx was against it, Keynes was against it, Friedman was against it. Even Ayn Rand was against it. Economic rent-seeking survives only in the dark, by obfuscation, distraction, corruption and perverse incentives. It endures only because it has not been part our political language for the last century, and in the tussle of everyday life, we are all susceptible to quietly putting our own short-term convenience ahead of our principles if we can get away with it (then justifying it to ourselves later)." Source: https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/progress-again-6f6213bdcde8 https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/progress-again-6f6213bdcd...
- zeristor 6y agoIt depends, and whilst San Francisco can’t be compared to Harlow there can be some tragic ramifications: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-47720887 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-47720887
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI mean, Terminus House was essentially turned into a large project where people were dumped, an approach that has shown similarly disastrous results in the US for decades. That's quite different from turning office space into desirable apartments.
- julianlam 6y agoIn what way? In Harlow, government took a hands off approach on zoning and oversight and let the free market figure out housing for the country's poorest. It all seems very similar to me. I'm sure at the start they also thought they were turning defunct office space into desirable apartments too.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoThe article linked by the comment I replied to stated this: > Smith is one of hundreds of residents placed at Terminus House in Harlow by councils in and around London, often many miles from everything and everybody they once knew. I'm not familiar with the specifics of UK subsidized housing, but it sure sounds like the residents were placed in this building by government.
- mattmanser 6y agoYeah, you're not and totally misunderstanding how that works. Councils used to be the biggest house builders in the UK. Then the neoliberals decided that was silly and the free-market could sort it. So they banned councils from building houses in the 80s. House builds plummeted from 300k per year to 30k per year. Plus they forced the council to get rid of their affordable housing by letting people buy their council house from the council. So now, when poor people who are guaranteed a house need one, the council have to buy a slot from the free market (and obviously need to go for cheap). Now the UK has a housing crisis. Yay, free market. Basically, the opposite of what you think. The council didn't 'choose' to put people there, they were forced to by the market and disasterous neo-liberal policies.
- brodie 6y agoI wouldn’t mind living in FiDi if it were in a brand new loft/studio apartment at an affordable price. All my SF life I’ve tried to stay in the real residential neighborhoods, the ones tourists don’t know exist. Would be nice to change it up without being rent gouged.
- wheelerwj 6y agoi lived in Fidi for about a year. Wasn't a bad experience. Lots of stuff within walking distance. Don't know that I would repeat it though.
- Shivetya 6y agoMight be a real fight with the zoning agencies and other "interested" groups to get it done. I expect any attempt to convert office space will run afoul of requirements to set aside a portion for rent controlled units and that alone could end many conversions. Before anyone has a hissy, while a good sounding idea it can raise costs for remaining units and price other people completely out of the market again and greatly delay a project as each group wants its pound of flesh. So the very same reason there is a lack of housing will rear its ugly head in this case as well