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His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues. It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to s

His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues. It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition. If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... lots of things. There's a spectrum with options all along it. It is not true for housing, transport and a lot of other, unavoidable expenses. Housing is the extreme example. Say an average smartphone is $350. $700 buys a luxury phone. $175 gets you an decent phone. Say median rent is $1500. Going above $3k will get you a palace and $750 probably doesn't get you anything. Quality, below median prices is on an extremely steep curve. Household economics are just completely different below and above a certain threshold... and this has gotten more pronounced over the last generation or two. Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing. Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days. The upshot of all this is that we underestimate how poor poor is.

hinkley 6y ago
I wonder if the availability of stuff has informed the price inflation of housing. What else do people have in their lives that they can bid up with whatever money they have left over from other concerns?
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  It's not just that it's bid up, it's that the govmnt has paternalized what sort of housing-should be legal. The housing that the poor could get back in the day is now illegal because it's "inhumane". There's regulations around square footage, fixtures, etc. Of course the "unintended consequence" is those people sleep in their cars or outside/tents, which is obviously worse than a shitty apartment that has a roof and walls. Maybe the closest thing to the old way is renting a room on Craig's list. But limited supply is also a big problem.
danaris 6y ago
> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing. > Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days. And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor. This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet. Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  Well arguably they are not really poor, compared to those cases of poverty in the 19th century.
  - Jotra7 6y ago
    Really? And just how useful is that comparison? Compassion, maybe you should try it some time.
  - danaris 6y ago
    They're days to weeks away from starvation, in some cases begging in the streets to survive, in others working themselves literally to death to avoid that fate for themselves and their families, while suffering from a variety of physical and mental ailments that they are unable to afford treatment for and struggling to keep the heat, power, and on. If that's not the face of "really poor" in the modern age, nothing is. Just because the details don't look exactly the same as those of 19th century Irish poverty does not mean it's "not real."
aidenn0 6y ago
Healthcare and housing are two things that seem to crush those in poverty (with transportation being a distant, but important, third. On one hand you can keep a job with no house, but can't with no transportation; on the other hand, cars have gotten cheaper and more reliable pretty steadily over my lifetime). A lot of families are a single injury to a non earner away from being bankrupt. Obviously an injury to an earner can be even worse. As TFA points out you can live in terrible conditions and maybe be a bit more financially stable, or you can live in passable conditions and be constantly short on money. Either way you are just trading one type of stress for another.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Maybe in the states this is true about transport. Here in ireland I would guesstimate the difference between entry level (personal car) ownership costs and upper-middle class car ownership at 1/1.5... maybe even less... maybe even negative. Fuel costs, registration and insurance costs are, I'd wager, negatively correlated with wealth and much higher here than the states. Driving an older car can cost €100-€200 more per month than a new one.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    1. Fuel and registration vary from state-to-state, but can be so cheap in the US that the purchase/repair/maintenance costs dominate. 2. As TFA states, many poor people have either liability only, or no insurance. The latter is illegal in most states, but "break the law or starve" has a fairly universal result of breaking the law.
therealdrag0 6y ago
I thought about this too when I was reading Crime and Punishment recently. The protagonist is described as very poor, but they still have a room in a house, and their room even includes house meals. Similarly with other poor characters; sometimes their space was just a sectioned off area of a bigger room (maybe like a floor-ceiling cubical). But hey, that's gotta be better than sleeping under a freeway for most people.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  The thing is, in the US the "sectioned off area of a bigger room" model of housing has been legislated and regulated out of existence. Similar for the other option the very poor (read: serfs) had in the Russia of the period Crime and Punishment is set in: just build something yourself to the best of your ability. The result was not always great, and there are all sorts of reasons (starting with fire-spreading externalities) for modern building codes, so I'm not suggesting it's necessaily desirable or viable to go back to where we were in the 19th century regarding housing. But the upshot is that building and health codes enforce a minimum quality on housing that surely feels unexceptionable to the people writing them while at the same time serving to price people out of housing.
  - taurath 6y ago
    It feels like we do our best to make poverty “invisible”. I often think of how much land would be taken up by slums. The US still is reeling from the idea of the “projects” in LBJs war on poverty - mainstream politicians literally won’t even use the word “poor” anymore. We still don’t have any sort of coherent policy for where to put poor people, especially the homeless.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Honestly, I think the role of stuff like this is exaggerated... if you look at real examples. Base level building cost per sqm at the low end is pretty low but.. 1 - IRL, especially in urban markets... rental markets tend to have a pattern where not far below median prices, quality falls off a cliff. For every dollar you save, you lose a lot: sqm, finish, location, etc. By about 0.5X median prices, there is often nothing. Conversely, in suburban & rural markets, quality per dollar tends to explode somewhere not far above median. 2 - This is usually less true for owner-occupied or other types of housing. I think the end of tenement-type housing has as much to do with culture as it has to do with pure economics or building norms. Most of those, originally, had live in owner-operators. It was a way to make housewifing into a business. Apartments didn't really exist yet.
jimbokun 6y ago
Cost Disease: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... Also add education and health care.

hinkley 6y ago

I wonder if the availability of stuff has informed the price inflation of housing. What else do people have in their lives that they can bid up with whatever money they have left over from other concerns?

therealdrag0 6y ago
It's not just that it's bid up, it's that the govmnt has paternalized what sort of housing-should be legal. The housing that the poor could get back in the day is now illegal because it's "inhumane". There's regulations around square footage, fixtures, etc. Of course the "unintended consequence" is those people sleep in their cars or outside/tents, which is obviously worse than a shitty apartment that has a roof and walls. Maybe the closest thing to the old way is renting a room on Craig's list. But limited supply is also a big problem.

danaris 6y ago

> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing. > Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days. And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor. This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet. Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.

criticaljudge 6y ago
Well arguably they are not really poor, compared to those cases of poverty in the 19th century.
- Jotra7 6y ago
  Really? And just how useful is that comparison? Compassion, maybe you should try it some time.
- danaris 6y ago
  They're days to weeks away from starvation, in some cases begging in the streets to survive, in others working themselves literally to death to avoid that fate for themselves and their families, while suffering from a variety of physical and mental ailments that they are unable to afford treatment for and struggling to keep the heat, power, and on. If that's not the face of "really poor" in the modern age, nothing is. Just because the details don't look exactly the same as those of 19th century Irish poverty does not mean it's "not real."

aidenn0 6y ago

Healthcare and housing are two things that seem to crush those in poverty (with transportation being a distant, but important, third. On one hand you can keep a job with no house, but can't with no transportation; on the other hand, cars have gotten cheaper and more reliable pretty steadily over my lifetime). A lot of families are a single injury to a non earner away from being bankrupt. Obviously an injury to an earner can be even worse. As TFA points out you can live in terrible conditions and maybe be a bit more financially stable, or you can live in passable conditions and be constantly short on money. Either way you are just trading one type of stress for another.

dalbasal 6y ago
Maybe in the states this is true about transport. Here in ireland I would guesstimate the difference between entry level (personal car) ownership costs and upper-middle class car ownership at 1/1.5... maybe even less... maybe even negative. Fuel costs, registration and insurance costs are, I'd wager, negatively correlated with wealth and much higher here than the states. Driving an older car can cost €100-€200 more per month than a new one.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  1. Fuel and registration vary from state-to-state, but can be so cheap in the US that the purchase/repair/maintenance costs dominate. 2. As TFA states, many poor people have either liability only, or no insurance. The latter is illegal in most states, but "break the law or starve" has a fairly universal result of breaking the law.

therealdrag0 6y ago

I thought about this too when I was reading Crime and Punishment recently. The protagonist is described as very poor, but they still have a room in a house, and their room even includes house meals. Similarly with other poor characters; sometimes their space was just a sectioned off area of a bigger room (maybe like a floor-ceiling cubical). But hey, that's gotta be better than sleeping under a freeway for most people.

bzbarsky 6y ago
The thing is, in the US the "sectioned off area of a bigger room" model of housing has been legislated and regulated out of existence. Similar for the other option the very poor (read: serfs) had in the Russia of the period Crime and Punishment is set in: just build something yourself to the best of your ability. The result was not always great, and there are all sorts of reasons (starting with fire-spreading externalities) for modern building codes, so I'm not suggesting it's necessaily desirable or viable to go back to where we were in the 19th century regarding housing. But the upshot is that building and health codes enforce a minimum quality on housing that surely feels unexceptionable to the people writing them while at the same time serving to price people out of housing.
- taurath 6y ago
  It feels like we do our best to make poverty “invisible”. I often think of how much land would be taken up by slums. The US still is reeling from the idea of the “projects” in LBJs war on poverty - mainstream politicians literally won’t even use the word “poor” anymore. We still don’t have any sort of coherent policy for where to put poor people, especially the homeless.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Honestly, I think the role of stuff like this is exaggerated... if you look at real examples. Base level building cost per sqm at the low end is pretty low but.. 1 - IRL, especially in urban markets... rental markets tend to have a pattern where not far below median prices, quality falls off a cliff. For every dollar you save, you lose a lot: sqm, finish, location, etc. By about 0.5X median prices, there is often nothing. Conversely, in suburban & rural markets, quality per dollar tends to explode somewhere not far above median. 2 - This is usually less true for owner-occupied or other types of housing. I think the end of tenement-type housing has as much to do with culture as it has to do with pure economics or building norms. Most of those, originally, had live in owner-operators. It was a way to make housewifing into a business. Apartments didn't really exist yet.

jimbokun 6y ago

Cost Disease: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... Also add education and health care.