5 ms·

If you're willing to discard any objections to the contrary, it's also easy to fix on the other side too. Require rental contracts to be filed with the city li

If you're willing to discard any objections to the contrary, it's also easy to fix on the other side too. Require rental contracts to be filed with the city like deeds are, and immediately remove anyone reported as trespassing in a place where they don't have a lease on file with the city. I think you're also ignoring that we're not out of housing. We're out of housing in the places many people want to live. If you go to Detroit, you can get a house for a song. Alaska will literally pay you for living there. There's a difference between having a place to live, and living somewhere you want to live. The former is easy to solve, the latter is hard to solve because demand is often driven by exclusivity.

thebooktocome 5y ago
If rental contracts could be registered with the state and enforced that effectively, they could also be enforced against landlords who fail to uphold their obligations as enumerated the contract. I don't know a single regular on r/landlords who wants that to happen. Just today there was a landlord trying to force a tenant to pay for a window broken by an unaffiliated third party (collateral damage from a neighbor's domestic dispute) when the lease very clearly said the landlord was responsible.
michaelmrose 5y ago
If there is lots of housing in places where there used to be good jobs then there isn't a lot of housing because for practical purposes. It's the same as replying to the issue of poverty with there are N good jobs unfilled when N is some small fraction of the number of people in poverty. It's trivially true that some can and in fact will climb out of poverty by accepting those N jobs and simultaneously true that most can't climb out of poverty via those jobs alone because multiple people can't accept the same position. Most of the people who are on the edge of not being able to afford <insert city here> can't all move away into the suburbs let alone Detroit because they can't earn enough money for all the things that aren't cheaper and it would cease to be cheaper as soon as collectively chose to do so. It is only cheap because its undesirable.
majormajor 5y ago
If you're homeless in Seattle how are you going to buy a house (or rent an apartment, even) in Detroit? You might argue that they should've made better decisions earlier - "my housing is precarious, time to move with my last few bucks before I'm totally out of money" - but then what is your proposed policy for dealing with bad decisions? Do you plan on doing things to try to prevent it? Or try to criminalize bad decisions?
franga2000 5y ago
You make it sound like people don't want to leave in these places just because they don't like the climate or something. They don't want to live there because they can't live there. Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless. If we want to have people to stop moving to big cities and live wherever they can afford, we need to have the infrastructure to allow people like that to work and socialise. I'd love to buy one of those 1$ houses (although these don't seem to exist as such in Central Europe) and move to some dying industrial town, but if that meant I'd have to work for minimum wage in that one local pub or gas station, and if there were no other people under 50 in a 100km radius, I don't think I'd last long there. I'd rather take my chances in the city.
- mopsi 5y ago
  > Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless. Nobody owes you a beautiful life.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    I would tend to agree with you, with the exception that there are too many regulations preventing new housing from being built, for reasons that have nothing to do with safety.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    We decide as a group what we owe people. You could just as easily declare that no one owes you the respect of your property rights.
    - logicchains 5y ago
      >We decide as a group what we owe people. That's only if you believe that all moral systems are equally valid so whatever the majority wants is right. But I doubt you believe that, because the majority could decide something like "it's okay to rape girls under 15" or "all Jews belong in ovens".
freshhawk 5y ago
So, have a domestic armed force checking people for rental papers and imprisoning them if they don't check out. That's considered an "easy fix" now?

thebooktocome 5y ago

If rental contracts could be registered with the state and enforced that effectively, they could also be enforced against landlords who fail to uphold their obligations as enumerated the contract. I don't know a single regular on r/landlords who wants that to happen. Just today there was a landlord trying to force a tenant to pay for a window broken by an unaffiliated third party (collateral damage from a neighbor's domestic dispute) when the lease very clearly said the landlord was responsible.

michaelmrose 5y ago

If there is lots of housing in places where there used to be good jobs then there isn't a lot of housing because for practical purposes. It's the same as replying to the issue of poverty with there are N good jobs unfilled when N is some small fraction of the number of people in poverty. It's trivially true that some can and in fact will climb out of poverty by accepting those N jobs and simultaneously true that most can't climb out of poverty via those jobs alone because multiple people can't accept the same position. Most of the people who are on the edge of not being able to afford <insert city here> can't all move away into the suburbs let alone Detroit because they can't earn enough money for all the things that aren't cheaper and it would cease to be cheaper as soon as collectively chose to do so. It is only cheap because its undesirable.

majormajor 5y ago

If you're homeless in Seattle how are you going to buy a house (or rent an apartment, even) in Detroit? You might argue that they should've made better decisions earlier - "my housing is precarious, time to move with my last few bucks before I'm totally out of money" - but then what is your proposed policy for dealing with bad decisions? Do you plan on doing things to try to prevent it? Or try to criminalize bad decisions?

franga2000 5y ago

You make it sound like people don't want to leave in these places just because they don't like the climate or something. They don't want to live there because they can't live there. Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless. If we want to have people to stop moving to big cities and live wherever they can afford, we need to have the infrastructure to allow people like that to work and socialise. I'd love to buy one of those 1$ houses (although these don't seem to exist as such in Central Europe) and move to some dying industrial town, but if that meant I'd have to work for minimum wage in that one local pub or gas station, and if there were no other people under 50 in a 100km radius, I don't think I'd last long there. I'd rather take my chances in the city.

mopsi 5y ago
> Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless. Nobody owes you a beautiful life.
- mikem170 5y ago
  I would tend to agree with you, with the exception that there are too many regulations preventing new housing from being built, for reasons that have nothing to do with safety.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  We decide as a group what we owe people. You could just as easily declare that no one owes you the respect of your property rights.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    >We decide as a group what we owe people. That's only if you believe that all moral systems are equally valid so whatever the majority wants is right. But I doubt you believe that, because the majority could decide something like "it's okay to rape girls under 15" or "all Jews belong in ovens".

freshhawk 5y ago

So, have a domestic armed force checking people for rental papers and imprisoning them if they don't check out. That's considered an "easy fix" now?