Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

mcsweeneys.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 452 posts

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#391

Post by [deleted] »

ty6853 wrote: post #227
smegger001 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be desperate to hire anybody, but not everyone is willing, with good reason, to work 16 hour days with no overtime pay and sub-minimum wage no benefits and work for only part of the year and get paid under the table. only reason it make since for migrants is the low cost/standard of living back home and currency arbitrage where us dollar are worth so much more than their own currency.

You can enter Mexico, and they have only checked I had paperwork/passport about one times of ten. No reason why you can't do the same thing if you want to do currency arbitrage. Paraguay will give you a residence permit pretty much just for showing up if you can get ahold of a USA passport, or you can avail yourself of the compact of free association and live in Micronesia without a visa. The arbitrage game is for ev…

[deleted]

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#392

Post by fakedang »

ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #135
fakedang wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbnb, free migrant housing, rampant unvetted immigration and a tech industry that pays more in comparison to other industries.

Ireland doesn't give free immigrant housing. They have processing centers where you can stay while your application is being processed. They are very bare bones accommodations and you only stay there for up to 14 days.

And where do they go on day 15? Mars? Uranus?

Please don't kid around, we know exactly how the government facilitates the migrations. If it weren't a biggie, why are there protests happening on the streets of Dublin?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_anti-immigration_prote...

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#393

Post by gamblor956 »

tk6855 wrote: post #343
meheleventyone wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient us…

I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their d…

Private water works well until the well dries up. It's hitting a lot of homesteaders in the Coachella Valley (CA) and in Arizona right now.

And people discover why CA's building codes are so onerous after the first earthquake knocks over their self-built house. Homes and offices built to current codes are designed to survive a Ritcher 7.0 earthquake with minimal to no damage. People don't even get out of bed for anything below a Ritcher 5. According to Caltech's earthquake tracker (https://scedc.caltech.edu/recent/Maps/Los_Angeles.html, L.A. has had almost 3 dozen earthquakes in the last 3 days alone (the biggest was a 2.8)...and nobody noticed. (For comparison, a 5.x earthquake caused several billions in damage in Washington D.C.; comparable earthquakes have caused so little damage in SoCal it's impossible to find numbers. Fracking-related 2.x earthquakes have caused hundreds of millions in damage in the Midwest, but in L.A., even pets sleep through something that weak.)

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#394

Post by toast0 »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #390
toast0 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.

Near a highway there is so much noise for homes though, I'm always shocked people find that acceptable. I checked a home near a highway and I couldn't even open the window due to the noise

Depends on what you count as 'near'. Adjacent to, yeah, it's noisy. Highway noise travels, but not that far. Textured walls and trees and bushes help reduce the distance that noise travels as well.

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#395

Post by sokoloff »

willis936 wrote: post #349
sokoloff wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s not a lot of confusion about how to build cheaper. Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land o…

All of those things probably work. Why do we have to give up so much that was considered standard 50 years ago? Recipe for social unrest.

There are 1.5 times as many people in the US competing for the same amount of land and buying houses using mortgages that are around 40% cheaper and many mortgages accept down payments that are 1/6th the size versus 1975, with underwriting that judges debt-to-income of 36% as “ideal” and some programs allowing 50% versus a limit of 25% in 1975, meaning the same amount of 1975 Americans plus the 50% extra Americans can all bid way, way more for that house you want, forcing you to pay up if you want it more than they do. In that time period, dual income households went from a minority to a majority, further heating up the competition.

Houses are also around 1.5 times the size with more bathrooms per bedroom in 2025 vs 1975, so “build less square footage and less fancy per square foot” isn’t at all “giving up so much that was standard 50 years ago”, but rather returning toward the standard of 50 years ago.

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#396

Post by gamblor956 »

tuna74 wrote: post #372
titanomachy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, these hotels become full of mentally ill, drug-dependent, and sometimes violent people, to the point where most people actually do feel safer in a tent. You can police things, but it’s not an easy problem. Where do you draw the line? Zero tolerance? As soon as someone has an angry outburst, or is caught with drugs, they’re back on the streets? Then you get back where you started pretty quickly.

College dorms seem to be able to solve this problem, so it should be doable for adults as well.

College dorms aren't full of mentally ill drug addicts. The population that lives on the streets has very little in common with students living in college dorms.

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#397

Post by gamblor956 »

aqme28 wrote: post #157
edude03 wrote: post #137

I think anyone who has actually been hands on trying to improve the lives of the unhomed know that 1) it’s a gradient between “I get kicked out of x everyday and go back at night” and “I’m sleeping under a bridge” and 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem. Often it’s mental health / substance abuse / lack of a support system. Heck I think there is enough movies/shows about how people fall thr…

I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness. Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless. Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and…

There are two groups of homeless: the financially homeless, which can be helped by providing housing, and the unstable homeless (addicts or mentally ill) for whom housing will do nothing.

The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.

The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#398

Post by sillyfluke »

scoofy wrote: post #386
sillyfluke wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the idea that building "high-end" housing does nothing is just wrong. Not sure anyone said this. The parent said it does nothing to solve homelessness and unless the homeowners are housing homeless people in their mansions, I think they're by and large correct. And you still have to contend with the luxury homes taking away future building potential by occupying a ridiculous amount of finite land that a county has a…

>Not sure anyone said this It's literally what the person I was responding to said: >>But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses. >>This does NOTHING to help homelessness... Given the Prop 13 tax environment. Building expensive homes is a necessary condition to facilitate local tax revenues necessary to build public housing. I…

>It's literally what the person I was responding to saidz

This is funny, I literally quoted the exact line you quoted.

In good faith, let me perfectly clear:

As I said in my previous comment and you requoted: Their original comment said it does nothing to help homelessness (my emphasis, again).

They did not claim it does absolutely nothing at all to help the housing pool in some little way, which I believe are the words your are putting in their mouth.

You implied in your original comment that they were also saying the latter, and by doing so, you moved the discussion from homelessness to whether or not an action helps in some small way to bring home prices down. The latter may help the upper middle class housing situation perhaps but is not guarenteed to allieviate homelessness in anyway and may in fact do nothing to help it, or at least, that point still has to be argued. That is the distinction.

>I'm saying allowing high-end homes is part of the solution.

Yes I understand that. Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#399

Post by sir0010010 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #393
tk6855 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their d…

Private water works well until the well dries up. It's hitting a lot of homesteaders in the Coachella Valley (CA) and in Arizona right now. And people discover why CA's building codes are so onerous after the first earthquake knocks over their self-built house. Homes and offices built to current codes are designed to survive a Ritcher 7.0 earthquake with minimal to no damage. People don't even get out of bed for anyt…

Have you done research and found that the majority of the excess cost of constructing California homes is due to the specific regulations dealing with earthquakes? Are you sure there aren't other regulations and/or building codes there that have nothing to do with earthquakes or health/safety, yet massively impact the cost of homes in California?

Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

#400

Post by sillyfluke »

RavlaAlvar wrote: post #378
sillyfluke wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have moderate Democrats (who say they want to solve the housing crisis for the poor and lower middle class) and fiscal conservative Republicans both championing "deregulation" and "abundance"(?) in the abstract while being cheerled by the same group of billionaires and private equity firms, you know one of them is the sucker. hint: its not the fiscal conservatives, billionaires or private equity firms. Those…

How come housing in red state cities are so much more affordable?

see this Tim Dillon rant: https://youtu.be/ui-gY9zthgI (starts at approx. 6th min)

But more seriously, you can talk to Jessica Preheim formerly of the Houston Coalition for the Homeless.

Post reply on HN