4 ms·

Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I

Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better? The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless. I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants. If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it. [0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
More / affordable housing alone does not fix the homeless problem alone though. I mean it'll help, but it's only one part of that problem.
- bluGill 2y ago
  There are a lot of people, particularly in places like San Francisco who could and would maintain a house if they could just get one. If you get out to someplace like Moline IL most homeless have "issues" and wouldn't be able to maintain a house/apartment if given one - because rent is cheap enough that you can maintain a small room on fast food income levels (it won't be easy, but it is possible). Of course there are a lot of other differences in those cities - you can live homeless in San Francisco a lot better than Moline (where you will freeze to death in winter), and I have no idea what sort of help either city provides for the homeless.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Housing is pretty much a prerequisite for fixing the other problems. I would guess that's it's almost impossible to kick something like a drug problem while sleeping on the streets.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    I wish I could find the source, but I am struggling to, so I will have to paraphrase. It was an interview with someone who lost their job, became homeless for a while, somehow managed to claw their way back to having a home and stable employment. The gist of the interview was, don't judge the homeless for drugs and alcohol. It's often the only comfort they have. What would really help is a home, but the cost of housing is so high that saving all of your booze money would never be enough to rent an apartment anyway. Might as well spend it on something that will make you feel a little better.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
philipwhiuk 2y ago
My controversial take is that I don't actually think Musk has enough to solve the problem.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time. I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.
- iamthemonster 2y ago
  His net worth is $378k per homeless person. You can't solve every homeless person's issues but he does at least have enough to get every homeless person into an apartment.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    I'm unconvinced rich person net worth is ever actually the dollar figure that's quoted. So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. If Musk suddenly became a good person and decided to cash out in order to house the homeless, I doubt he would actually end up with $378k per homeless person.
    - Tade0 2y ago
      > So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. Which is why it's not bought and sold, but used as collateral to obtain low, low interest loans.
    - andreygrehov 2y ago
      > If Musk suddenly became a good person Is Musk a bad person?
  - HappySweeney 2y ago
    Only if he could barter Tesla stock for the apartments, or by liquidating very very slowly, so as to not crash the value of the rest of his shares (so he can keep doing this). Unfortunately, neither are very realistic (ignoring, of course, that Musk would never do this in the first place).
monero-xmr 2y ago
The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly. https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-plagued-nycha-housing-wait-65-days-for-minor-repairs-docs/ https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-... Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors. Without the profit motive, rental property becomes dilapidated quickly. I think the real solution for public housing is to make it rent-to-own for the tenants so they actually care. Otherwise it just goes to shit.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  > The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly. In my dreams I would hire full time staff and significantly incentivize timely work with cold, hard cash bonuses. > Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors. I guess in this fantasy, I own all of the buildings so it isn't really "public" housing. I guess I would have the option of doing something about bad tenants. Rent-to-own is a pretty good idea.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Your fantasy works great for normal people who for reasons can't afford a house but overall treat things well. It doesn't work for someone who has mental issues which sometimes turn violent. (often hard drugs are a root cause - but there are some born this way through no fault of anyone.) I don't know what to do about those but it is a real problem. In the past society put them in institutions, but that has been out since the 1960s or before - for good reason. Institutions invite by nature invite the staff to abuse the people. Homeless is better than institutions were (even including cases of someone freezing to death). From what I know of prisons I can tell you we have not solved this human nature problem and so I cannot support going back to institutions.
gruez 2y ago
>So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better? I'm pretty sure effective altruists have the same question, crunched the numbers, and figured out it was something like malaria nets or similar interventions in developing countries. Even if you limit the set of possible projects to things that affect your local community, investing in public housing is probably bad bang/buck ratio given how much capital it takes (ie. hundreds of thousands) to help one family. Job training programs, micro loans, or funding YIMBY campaigns probably provide larger benefit.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I'm skeptical of that, in part because I think the data you get out of e.g. job training programs is so messy. Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help. The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training. Maybe I overvalue simplicity and certainty, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe there is just something appealing about just directly addressing a need.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help. If you have "untold billions" to spend, you can probably spend a few million on data scientists to make sure you're spending your money as effectively as possible. Moreover, impact shouldn't be hard to measure with RCTs (ie. only helping half of the neighborhoods and comparing it to the other half). >The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training. Right, but by doing so, you're missing out all the possible higher value interventions, especially ones that aren't applicable to everyone, but would have much greater impact.
solardev 2y ago
I wonder if you can make a jobs program out of it too. Hire the unhoused to build their own houses? Kinda like the Civilian Conservation Corps, but for housing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_heimdall 2y ago
Solving symptoms can be helpful, especially in a trauma care type situation, but do you view the lack of housing as the root cause? Getting people under a roof can definitely help stop the bleeding, but the more important question is how to help solve whatever it was that led to the problem in the first place. If it really is as simple as a lack of available roofs, that would be a very simple problem to fix with all of that Bezos money.
- tharmas 2y ago
  Financialization of housing is the problem, not those who are homeless.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Is public housing the fix there? It seems like that would only work at a scale such that a vast majority of the market is publicly owned, i.e. communism. Financialization of housing may be much better controlled by limiting what financial mechanisms can be made on top of real estate assets. As it stands, housing and related derivatives prop up a huge amount of "money" and investment portfolios. Government owned housing won't fix that directly, and the government is incentivized to not solve that because it would likely mean economic or monetary collapse.
    - 0max 2y ago
      Austria has highly available state housing of high quality. I don't think they qualify as a communist state, despite one of the more prominent complexes named after Karl Marx.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Interesting, that's a good rabbit hole for me to go down. Unpopular opinion, but much of the west is at least partially communist these days. We may not have a communist political structure that looks like a 20th century dictatorship claiming communism but we do have plenty of state-run programs that fit really well under a banner of communism (or socialism, or Marxism if the term communism is too loaded).
123yawaworht456 2y ago
occasionally, as a thought exercise, I think about breaking into someone else's home and stealing their shit it's fine because they're rich so they deserve it
freefaler 2y ago
> I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. The untold billions is in Amazon, SpaceX, Tesla factories & etc... To have access to those we need to dismantle the assets to swap them to the billions they're currently valued at. Then allocate them more efficiently than the pension funds who owns most of the stock in S&P500. These guys are not sitting on a big pile of gold in their basements, they are constantly trying to invest this capital to produce something. These warehouses aren't cheap, nor programmers making 250K/year in Seatle. I am not sure your plan will work as intended :) The housing market is mostly a supply side problem with bad laws and taxation put on top of it. A lot of emigrees came to USA and had affordable housing until recently. Sure, there are more people now, but the density is way lower than in other countries and we can build way higher than before.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

More / affordable housing alone does not fix the homeless problem alone though. I mean it'll help, but it's only one part of that problem.

bluGill 2y ago
There are a lot of people, particularly in places like San Francisco who could and would maintain a house if they could just get one. If you get out to someplace like Moline IL most homeless have "issues" and wouldn't be able to maintain a house/apartment if given one - because rent is cheap enough that you can maintain a small room on fast food income levels (it won't be easy, but it is possible). Of course there are a lot of other differences in those cities - you can live homeless in San Francisco a lot better than Moline (where you will freeze to death in winter), and I have no idea what sort of help either city provides for the homeless.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Housing is pretty much a prerequisite for fixing the other problems. I would guess that's it's almost impossible to kick something like a drug problem while sleeping on the streets.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I wish I could find the source, but I am struggling to, so I will have to paraphrase. It was an interview with someone who lost their job, became homeless for a while, somehow managed to claw their way back to having a home and stable employment. The gist of the interview was, don't judge the homeless for drugs and alcohol. It's often the only comfort they have. What would really help is a home, but the cost of housing is so high that saving all of your booze money would never be enough to rent an apartment anyway. Might as well spend it on something that will make you feel a little better.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

philipwhiuk 2y ago

My controversial take is that I don't actually think Musk has enough to solve the problem.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago
I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time. I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.
iamthemonster 2y ago
His net worth is $378k per homeless person. You can't solve every homeless person's issues but he does at least have enough to get every homeless person into an apartment.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I'm unconvinced rich person net worth is ever actually the dollar figure that's quoted. So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. If Musk suddenly became a good person and decided to cash out in order to house the homeless, I doubt he would actually end up with $378k per homeless person.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    > So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. Which is why it's not bought and sold, but used as collateral to obtain low, low interest loans.
  - andreygrehov 2y ago
    > If Musk suddenly became a good person Is Musk a bad person?
- HappySweeney 2y ago
  Only if he could barter Tesla stock for the apartments, or by liquidating very very slowly, so as to not crash the value of the rest of his shares (so he can keep doing this). Unfortunately, neither are very realistic (ignoring, of course, that Musk would never do this in the first place).

monero-xmr 2y ago

The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly. https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-plagued-nycha-housing-wait-65-days-for-minor-repairs-docs/ https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-... Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors. Without the profit motive, rental property becomes dilapidated quickly. I think the real solution for public housing is to make it rent-to-own for the tenants so they actually care. Otherwise it just goes to shit.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago
> The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly. In my dreams I would hire full time staff and significantly incentivize timely work with cold, hard cash bonuses. > Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors. I guess in this fantasy, I own all of the buildings so it isn't really "public" housing. I guess I would have the option of doing something about bad tenants. Rent-to-own is a pretty good idea.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Your fantasy works great for normal people who for reasons can't afford a house but overall treat things well. It doesn't work for someone who has mental issues which sometimes turn violent. (often hard drugs are a root cause - but there are some born this way through no fault of anyone.) I don't know what to do about those but it is a real problem. In the past society put them in institutions, but that has been out since the 1960s or before - for good reason. Institutions invite by nature invite the staff to abuse the people. Homeless is better than institutions were (even including cases of someone freezing to death). From what I know of prisons I can tell you we have not solved this human nature problem and so I cannot support going back to institutions.

gruez 2y ago

>So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better? I'm pretty sure effective altruists have the same question, crunched the numbers, and figured out it was something like malaria nets or similar interventions in developing countries. Even if you limit the set of possible projects to things that affect your local community, investing in public housing is probably bad bang/buck ratio given how much capital it takes (ie. hundreds of thousands) to help one family. Job training programs, micro loans, or funding YIMBY campaigns probably provide larger benefit.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago
I'm skeptical of that, in part because I think the data you get out of e.g. job training programs is so messy. Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help. The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training. Maybe I overvalue simplicity and certainty, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe there is just something appealing about just directly addressing a need.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help. If you have "untold billions" to spend, you can probably spend a few million on data scientists to make sure you're spending your money as effectively as possible. Moreover, impact shouldn't be hard to measure with RCTs (ie. only helping half of the neighborhoods and comparing it to the other half). >The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training. Right, but by doing so, you're missing out all the possible higher value interventions, especially ones that aren't applicable to everyone, but would have much greater impact.

solardev 2y ago

I wonder if you can make a jobs program out of it too. Hire the unhoused to build their own houses? Kinda like the Civilian Conservation Corps, but for housing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

_heimdall 2y ago

Solving symptoms can be helpful, especially in a trauma care type situation, but do you view the lack of housing as the root cause? Getting people under a roof can definitely help stop the bleeding, but the more important question is how to help solve whatever it was that led to the problem in the first place. If it really is as simple as a lack of available roofs, that would be a very simple problem to fix with all of that Bezos money.

tharmas 2y ago
Financialization of housing is the problem, not those who are homeless.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Is public housing the fix there? It seems like that would only work at a scale such that a vast majority of the market is publicly owned, i.e. communism. Financialization of housing may be much better controlled by limiting what financial mechanisms can be made on top of real estate assets. As it stands, housing and related derivatives prop up a huge amount of "money" and investment portfolios. Government owned housing won't fix that directly, and the government is incentivized to not solve that because it would likely mean economic or monetary collapse.
  - 0max 2y ago
    Austria has highly available state housing of high quality. I don't think they qualify as a communist state, despite one of the more prominent complexes named after Karl Marx.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Interesting, that's a good rabbit hole for me to go down. Unpopular opinion, but much of the west is at least partially communist these days. We may not have a communist political structure that looks like a 20th century dictatorship claiming communism but we do have plenty of state-run programs that fit really well under a banner of communism (or socialism, or Marxism if the term communism is too loaded).

123yawaworht456 2y ago

occasionally, as a thought exercise, I think about breaking into someone else's home and stealing their shit it's fine because they're rich so they deserve it

freefaler 2y ago

> I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. The untold billions is in Amazon, SpaceX, Tesla factories & etc... To have access to those we need to dismantle the assets to swap them to the billions they're currently valued at. Then allocate them more efficiently than the pension funds who owns most of the stock in S&P500. These guys are not sitting on a big pile of gold in their basements, they are constantly trying to invest this capital to produce something. These warehouses aren't cheap, nor programmers making 250K/year in Seatle. I am not sure your plan will work as intended :) The housing market is mostly a supply side problem with bad laws and taxation put on top of it. A lot of emigrees came to USA and had affordable housing until recently. Sure, there are more people now, but the density is way lower than in other countries and we can build way higher than before.