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I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no ex
by Gimpei 11mo ago
I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
- hooo 11mo agoAlso, why does it get upvotes so quickly?
- next_xibalba 10mo agoMy pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 10mo agoThat’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.
- next_xibalba 10mo agoI think many like to think HN is excepted.
- flag_fagger 10mo ago> Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube. We call that “the voting populace”
- bigyabai 11mo ago> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoMakes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny. Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
- grafmax 10mo agoLet’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoLabor costs and a big part of materials cost is driven by landlords
- pandaman 10mo agoEven when rents go down to cost, they are still going to be greater than zero and labor and materials won't turn free. Cost won't ever be so low that one could afford housing while doing nothing productive and even less so while indulging in a drug habit.
- skavi 11mo agoWell it's a fairly entertaining read as someone with no current ambitions of solving any of these crises.
- etangent 10mo agoOkay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.
- blindriver 10mo ago[flagged]
- khuey 10mo ago> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
- hunterpayne 10mo agoCounterpoint, WV and NY have snow several months a year.
- mlrtime 10mo agoWhat is your point? I mean I get it, people don't like sleeping in the snow, but what are you saying? Where are they going when it snows? You're saying CA cities wouldn't have this problem if it snowed but still gave out billions and allowed open drug usage?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ajuc 10mo ago> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment. > No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them. BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy. > It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people. Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country. > It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem. Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
- nope1000 10mo agoDoes an article need to supply all this expertise or can it not just be descriptive?
- grafmax 10mo agoMore housing supply doesn’t house people who have no people to pay for those houses. It’s a wealth inequality issue we just don’t want to face.
- mlrtime 10mo agoWhy is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?
- grafmax 10mo agoThe scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits. Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction. Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
- pandaman 10mo agoWhat do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?
- grafmax 10mo agoNo I am saying your just so story of why homeless people are homeless does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness. Why would this be if your sounds-good-to-you explanation were the actual factor driving homelessness?
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- w0de0 10mo ago“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.” Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point? Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied. Upton Sinclair was not a meat processor.