The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression • Hacker News Board

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#751

Post by dukeyukey » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #588

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it’s more profitable to cook steaks for the rich. It's equally as profitable to cook steaks for the poor. The margin on the steak is the same, regardless of the wealth of the buyer. This is not true for apartments. The renter holds the apartment hostage for the length of the lease, so the behavior of the renter determines the margin. Someone who leaves the apartment as it was is high margin, someone who t…

> equally as profitable to cook steaks for the poor. The margin on the steak is the same You’re arguing a steakhouse in rural West Virginia is as lucrative as one in New York’s financial district?

Might be! Restaurants definitely pop up and disappear faster here in London than my poor, rural hometown in Wales.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#752

Post by Wojtkie » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

lapetitejort wrote: post #651

nomel wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone skipping fare This, obviously, isn't what raises fear in people. "Safer" for some statistics, like a car crash, but also much less safe for things like getting stabbed, spit on, confronted. Sure, it's somewhat rare on public transport, but they're exactly zero in my car, at freeway speeds. edit: A quick google search shows two stabbings, one slit throat, and a page full of fights, in my area, over the last…

I may never get stabbed in my car, but I will get brake-checked, cut off, buzzed, rammed, and shot at [0]. Driving is stressful and I dread every getting on the highway. [0]: https://everytownresearch.org/reports-of-road-rage-shootings...

Everytown is definitely a biased source to use

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#753

Post by kurthr » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:43 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #568

kurthr wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If parking spaces are $400/mo, you're going to be hard pressed to have power, water, and heating for $500. The reason a tent in the city is $0 is because that is an externality that is allowed... you can't even stay for free in a campground, because water, trash, and toilets cost money.

or, and hear me out here, parking spaces are $400/mo because that's what people are willing to pay in a sparsely populated autocentric living environment. We don't have to take things like "the cost of a parking space in the system we've created" as a fact, we can change the value of the parking space.

Well, usually those are for parking either in quite dense (>3 story) business/commercial or residential. It's "only $13/day". Even Tokyo, NY, Paris parking spaces don't get cheaper. So the exception is for rural/suburban environments where parking spaces are cheap/free because space is cheap. Guess what, if you want to live cheaply, it's not going to be where everyone else wants to live and work. Cheap Tokyo apartments are far from transit and on the outskirts or even outside Yamanote. People commute daily over an hour by train each way.

Shanghai and Beijing built huge amounts of dense housing (also Shezhen, Chongqing, Hefei, Ordos) and what happened to property prices? They spiraled out of control since they were considered investments (that only go up) with many of them vacant. What happened to prices in Tokyo (notably after the '89 bust and not before)? Housing became relatively affordable since it's not considered an investment (even with near 0% interest rates).

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#754

Post by gottorf » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #727

gottorf wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Irrational" is a strange way to describe it. People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person). And especially when the cost of making the wrong judgment is high, it's entirely rational to wan…

> People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person) So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange? Lots of human behavior is irrati…

> So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange?

GP's wording implied that rational people take public transit because they've done the risk-benefit analysis, and irrational people don't. I'm not sure if there's actual evidence behind such a risk-benefit analysis.

> people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

If the goal is to attract more people to use public transit, it would be vastly more effective to police the occurrence of antisocial behavior on it, instead of telling people that it's actually OK, the chance of stepping on a puddle of piss or being shouted at incoherently or being pushed onto an oncoming train is much lower than they think, and is lower than the chance of being injured in a car crash while driving to work. Whether or not that is true (and I wouldn't mind seeing some cold, hard data on it), most people will prefer to roll the dice with their car.

In other words: if you're a social architect keen on implementing your vision of a flourishing public transit system, it would be irrational not to account for people's loss aversion, whether or not that loss aversion itself is irrational.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#755

Post by cptskippy » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

GenerocUsername wrote: post #600

gavin_gee wrote: post #594

Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit. I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed. In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is…

Available transit needs to include safe transit. The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class by their lack of fare-enforcement and other low-end enabling schemes that sound great on paper, but lead to complicated downstream chilling effects on the entire region.

That's a public health issue that no one wants to address. We're completely ok with de-funding public healthcare and social services while complaining about the results.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#756

Post by brewdad » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #665

HelloMcFly wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a tax on vacant properties is potentially a better way to go, though checking and enforcement could be the issue (exempting one's primary and maybe secondary homes); multi-unit housing would also be exempt. This would place more downward pressure on rents and decrease the investment upside on buying. I'm sure this is a bad idea in a number of ways I haven't considered.

This is so difficult to enforce. You're going to have people go door-to-door checking if houses are vacant? What if someone goes on vacation? States require legibility. The simplest way to enforce high land and property utilization is to tax all property. In California, for example, you have reports of people who move and use their old home in the Bay Area for storage because they're paying the same nominal property…

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man but you'd have to raise my property taxes (already above the national median) by 3-4x before I'd even consider renting out our empty bedroom to a stranger. For starters, there's no legal or practical way to modify my home to allow either of us any sense of privacy or freedom to come and go without being a significant disruption to the other.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#757

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #528

cogman10 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What government policy would allow for a 2k apartment building and not a $500 apartment building? I just don't buy this argument. The reason there's not a $500 apartments being built is because by expanding the residence out just a tiny bit you can charge $2000 for the same space that 2 $500 apartments would occupy. I'm seeing this play out where I live that has practically no zoning laws or regulations (LOTS of buil…

If zoning regulations mean you're only going to be able to service 1/4 of the annual new construction demand, then the smart money is on serving the high end of the market. If things get zoned in a way that you can serve the whole market and not just the top end, you can bet that people will figure out how to build those units too. The market has been artificially constrained so that developers are making the choice…

Most of the markets in goods and services seem to evolve towards hollowing out the middle: companies offer either bottom-tier garbage or luxury price (but not necessarily luxury quality) options for those not price-sensitive. What makes people think housing is different? That with unencumbered ability to build, we'll end up with decent-quality, livable, mid-tier apartments? Other markers show we should expect a mix of luxury apartment with barely-livable tin can sized slums complexes. And all of them for rent, not to buy.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#758

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

jwestbury wrote: post #112

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Metro areas do not have enough affordable housing. It's well established that local governments cannot build enough new affordable housing, partly because any contractor that bids goes way over the value of a private housing venture. The idea that there's enough housing but "in the wrong place" is like saying there's plenty of jobs, they're just in third world countries and Scandinavia. The idea that the solutio…

> Most Metro areas do not have enough affordable housing. There's no such thing as affordable housing[0]. Just housing. You can certainly argue that building a house is too expensive -- and due to NIMBYism, discriminatory policies, and anti-density regulatory environments, this is often true -- but affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building, and the problem is generally that housing stock simply doesn't ke…

> affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building

Value is, by definition, "An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return." Having the money to buy a house (for its advertised value) or not is what determines if you can afford it or not.

If you can't afford a house it's not affordable. If your city has housing, but a large population who can't afford said houses, then you have unaffordable housing. If you don't have any housing at all, you still don't have affordable housing.

This isn't really something worth debating. Affordable housing is a very well established part of the governance of cities, regardless of what contortions a blogger wants to use to reframe a discussion away from economic inequality.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#759

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #680

gavin_gee wrote: post #594

Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit. I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed. In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is…

> Seattle is the perfect example. If we have high speed rail between Bellingham and Seattle it would dramatically change the dynamics of the housing situation in Seattle. It's not like Bellingham is affordable anymore. Median price is ~$650K. (People looking to escape effects of climate change in parts of the country that are becoming hotter are moving to places like Bellingham) Yes, high speed rail and other forms o…

Bellingham isn't very affordable, but Marysville and Darington are still kind of affordable. And those two places aren't that far north of Everett.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#760

Post by ushtaritk421 » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:52 PM UTC

Draiken wrote: post #689

carom wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is government policy. Specifically, it is restrictive zoning. Landlords do not get to set prices to whatever they want, they set prices to what the market will pay. If rent has gone up faster than inflation it just means that demand has increased or supply has decreased in that time. You can build apartments for ~$250 per sqft. The issue is that local governments make it really hard to build more apartments. If yo…

Isn't that what lobbying is all about? You effectively have companies paying politicians to keep these zoning laws that keep the rents as high as possible. Profit above all else. Arguments that boil down to "government policy" can basically be translated to "big companies policies". Whether it's through illegal or legal bribing (lobbying), it's what we see after decades of influence.

It’s big companies but it’s also (mostly?) the nice retired insurance agents and school teachers who like their quiet neighborhood and the fact that the house they bought 30 years ago can be sold for 4x its inflation-adjusted purchase price when they’re ready.